SCHIEDAM.- Dancing skeletons, gaping mouths, and a green maze with slowly moving walls. At Monopole, the artist Oscar Peters (1981) is building BARBARIAN, a monumental, haunted house inspired by fairground attractions, horror films, and amusement parks. Peters is fascinated by the never-ending human need to test the boundaries of fear. Wooden structures, theatrical effects, and strokes of paint are deliberately left exposed and turn the installation into a large-scale, handmade spectacle.
Peters uses all the familiar ingredients of a classical haunted house – skulls, ghosts, a maze, and other archetypal tropes – to create a world where terror slowly makes way for questions about who we are and why we exist. In the end, the act of dwelling on such questions in a house with an exit that is difficult to find may well be the most terrifying thing of all.
Dancing skeletons
BARBARIAN features hanging, dancing skeletons, while shaking their bones, they find themselves somewhere between slapstick and terror: simultaneously comical and gruesome. Just like in classical haunted houses, humour and fear are constantly taking turns, a field of tension that keeps coming up throughout the installation.
Now, where exactly was that exit?
At the centre of BARBARIAN is a green maze made from imitation stone walls. These walls are slowly rotating, causing the structure to constantly change and making it seem as if the exit is disappearing even further out of sight. Hanging above them are giant gaping mouths that unexpectedly move downwards only to come to an abrupt standstill right above the visitors’ heads. Peters based them on the mechanical claws used in fairground attractions, but transformed them into threatening sculptures that play with ancient fears: being eaten and losing control.
A ticket to the end
Waiting at the end of the maze is a metres-high skull, built on top of a ticket machine. It is as if death itself is selling tickets. Visitors are offered a choice here: to buy a ticket to the end of existence or to once again be swallowed up by the maze. Positioned across from the skull is jester’s cap made from fabric, enticing visitors to step inside. While peering through the eye holes, visitors will once again be confronted with the towering skull on the other side. Through the eyes of the jester, they are thus literally looking death in the eye. For centuries, jesters have been holding up a mirror to us, making us laugh at things we would rather look away from.
Cabinet of curiosities
Filled with board games, toys, books and other historical source material on the subjects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century haunted houses and fairground attractions, this cabinet gives an insight into the fascinations of Oscar Peters. He has been building this collection from an early age, including the 1985 Spookslot (Ghost Castle) board game, which is now also being played by a new generation, and the much-loved pop-up book Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski, a staple in children's rooms since 1979. The collection shows how images from popular culture evolved into the building blocks for BARBARIAN.
Oscar Peters
Oscar Peters (1981) obtained a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) and a master’s degree in Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania). He predominantly creates large kinetic sculptures that often convey the huge sense of joy he had while making them. Many of his artworks thump, rattle, squeak, or creak. His work show his fascination for danger and things that are staged to be ‘scary’. One of his best-known installations is The Savage, an eight-metre-high rollercoaster he built in 2020 in a huge factory hall in The Hague for his exhibition VOLTA. His work is shown around the world, with exhibitions from the United States to Japan. From 13 September, his newest installation, BARBARIAN, will be on view at Monopole.
