Winged Victory: The Rebreak
Zahra Mansoor Hussain, AMT class of 2023, talks about her remake project for Integrative Studio with Anne Attali. Remake projects challenge first year students to critically reflect on an art piece to develop a deeper understanding of it via reinterpretation, appropriation, and innovation.
My remake project revolves around the Winged Victory or Nike of Samothrace– a 180 BC, hellenistic statue that dominates a massive staircase in the Denon wing of the Louvre today.
For the first part, I focused on the many copies made of the statue across the world, in places such as the Caesarâs Palace Casino in Las Vegas, the island of Samothrace, and Calvary Cemetery in Pittsburgh.
The juxtaposition of archaic Nike with its modern replica sites reveals a bizarre practice of entities iconising themselves through the symbols of such objects. It raises the question of what purpose is served by copying a sculpture with such persistency, and what value the replicas hold if the original sculpture still exists. Moreover, weighing in how the replicas of the Victory were created under different conditions and periods, presumably to serve different purposes, at different locations than the original, one may wonder how that factors into their value and stories. The original Nike of Samothrace commemorated a Rhodian naval victory- does the Nike that stands outside Caesarâs Palace commemorate the same thing? Did Caesarâs Nike have the same âbackstoryâ as Samothraceâs Nike? Would the Nike at Caesarâs Palace have looked the same as the one at the Louvre before her head and arms broke off?
Digital drawing was used to create a comic book with thin paper and hand-stitched binding. Named âWinged Victory: The Rebreak,â it conjures four remake and ‘rebreak’ storylines around creative and humorous ways that Victory could have looked like, and how she could have been broken to reach her present state, with each story integrating different locations its multiple iterations occupy in the world.
The humour of the piece serves to critique the appropriation and commercialisation of the ancient statue by parodying the situations, bringing the ridiculousness of the circumstances into perspective.
For the second part of the project, to resolve the mystery of the Nikeâs appearance, I collaborated with fellow Parsons student, Nicola Carsley. Our primary source of information was the imagination of the onlookers of the Nike at her original version in the Louvre.
Worksheets with prints of the statue were given out, accompanying instructions for the audience to draw on them, what they thought the statueâs arms and head would have looked like before they were lost forever, as well as directions to sign their artworks.
Using Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro, the drawings cultivated were then scanned and compiled into an animation that was overlaid on a video of the Winged Victory exhibit at the Louvre to convey a proposal for an installation of the drawings projected on the actual statue for one night at the museum- specifically, the annual Nuit de MuseÌe in May 2020.
It is titled âVisages of Victoryâ after the multiple possibilities of the statueâs face and torso dreamed up by its viewers. The different artist signatures were also superimposed onto the statue display to answer the challenge of the Victory lacking a recognised creator. The proposed installation serves to reflect upon how imagination can compensate for gaps in human and collective historical memory.
The project, through its two parts, thus conveys how imagined perceptions can become reality when the reality of an event or object is not known, and that imagination has the capacity to be even more vibrant than reality.
Contact Zahra at mansz807@newschool.edu to learn more about, or to purchase a copy of her work.