Zuilengalerij met beelden tijdens de Dublin International Exhibition van 1865 c. 1865 - 1880

Curator: It's like stepping back in time. Looking at this image, what jumps out at you first? Editor: A ghost convention? All those pale busts, lining up perfectly like some sort of… classical judgment. A tad sterile, isn’t it? Curator: Precisely! What we're viewing is a stereoscopic card titled "Zuilengalerij met beelden tijdens de Dublin International Exhibition van 1865," created by the London Stereoscopic Company sometime between 1865 and 1880. It's a gelatin-silver print—essentially, an early photograph—that captures the statuary court. Editor: Ah, "statuary court," that makes sense. Exhibitions like these were exercises in empire. A global flexing of power, masked as art and progress. The statuary, those idealized, often white, figures – a way to promote European aesthetic values as superior. Curator: Good point, though I think these exhibitions served multiple functions at the time. Aside from this… assertive promotion of western ideals… images like these also allowed people from all over the world to experience this “event” from their homes in stunning depth through 3D stereoscopy. Editor: Experience what? The thrill of the colonizer? But you’re right; this technology disseminated visual propaganda effectively, though access certainly depended on one's position. Look at how the architecture itself echoes power dynamics, the columns almost mimicking soldiers. And that vanishing point… leading where, exactly? Progress? Civilization? It’s staged. Curator: True, though there's also a strange vulnerability to these images… an inherent flatness alongside a dimensional trick, so that you get a sense that whatever spectacle unfolded in front of this exhibition's visitor’s eyes now only ever exists in a mediated past. Like you and I speaking over it now. Editor: But let’s remember what remains unseen here: labor, extraction of materials, the cultural context often stripped from artworks deemed worthy of display… This isn’t a neutral scene. Curator: Indeed. I think a lot can be found simply in these attempts to be “definitive." Editor: Right—the grand narrative cracks a little with each viewing.