Part of the exhibition Broken Time
The exhibition General Idea. Broken Time includes a room dedicated to the 1994 installation Fin de siècle [End of the Century]. It is a large romantic glacial landscape—constructed from hundreds of layers of Styrofoam—with three small white seals, located in a non-time or mythical time, based on the oil painting The Sea of Ice (1823) by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.
In a sense, it is a “self-portrait” of the group, as are all the works composed of three figures included in the exhibition. The situation of baby white seals was the subject of public debate in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a result, they were declared an endangered species in many countries, but not in Canada, where they reproduce in large numbers. There, the seals were clubbed to death so as not to damage their skin, and the image of red blood on white snow became a media icon in those years. Fin de siècle was created during the period when Partz and Zontal were diagnosed as HIV carriers, so the work was interpreted as a portrait of the artists as victims.
