The history of human civilizations is marked by traumatic experiences of loss, which have produced a great variety of cultural coping forms and strategies. Natural disasters, accidents, wars, epidemics and old age confront us with our inevitable finiteness. In a time in which the superhuman seems feasible, the confrontation with death confronts us with our transience, which overwhelms us with the loss of a human being and leaves us with the painful feeling of grief. The heterogeneity of the ways of coping with loss and the strategies for dealing with it show, on the one hand, that grief seems to be a universal feeling, but is embodied in a variety of ways and finds its individual expression. People suffer from loss experiences and seek successful coping strategies to escape grief.
In the exhibition LAMENTO I – Mourning and Tears, the Museum für Sepulkralkultur dedicates itself to a selection of international, contemporary works of art, the collective and individual experience of mourning experienced and felt as a consequence of a traumatic experience of loss. The artistic works are developed and exhibited in the context and in correspondence with the collection of the Museum für Sepulkralkultur.

Museum für Sepulkralkultur
Weinbergstraße 25-27
34117 Kassel, Germany
16 November 2019 to 15 March 2020
Opening on Friday, 15 November 2019, at 19.30 hrs