This will look great in my collection / Fuck the "British" museumAs part of a workshop within the Performance Lab module at King’s College, London, completed for my MA, I created these two collages made up of images from familial, historical, monumental and institutional archives.
The workshop, run by guest artist, Tara Fatehi, and based on her own practice research project, Mishandled Archives, inspired me to play about with the documentary form of archives. Removing, redacting and expanding the frame of each archival image: I focused on the colonial violences and exclusions of archives inherent to the project of museums and galleries.
This will look great in my collection… places a figure of a pondering Edward Colston, above an inverted image of the roof of the British Museum, looking through a family picture with the people redacted, to see straight through the museum objects. The image of a museum display is mine, taken 30 January 2022, of Donald Locke’s Trophies of Empire, 1972-4. Ceramic, wood, metal, glass and other materials. Shown at the Life Between Islands exhibition at Tate Britain.
Fuck the “British” museum is a corresponding piece, where the removed image of Edward Colston’s statue being rolled off after protests in 2020, is replaced by the central walls of the British Museum. This intertextuality of images highlights the ways in which museums and statues remember history, and how we as people may choose to interact with them. The coloniality of museums and statues has an interwoven texture that allows for multiple applications here.
The display of these two images in the Anatomy Museum Theatre, Strand, playfully toys with questions of who is displayed, who becomes spectator, and who and what is and isn’t represented by the archive.
The two images are placed around one of the museum columns, inviting spectators to enter the space and move around to interact with the two corresponding pieces. The movement that viewers undertake to look at each piece mimics and satirises the movement of a casual museum-goer, walking around an exhibition.
In addition to my thinking around and with these “mishandled archives”, I completed a short freewrite that helped centre my ideas. If the writing seems disconnected or abrupt, that is a result of Tara Fatehi’s creative and generative interruptions to the freewriting task.
When we remember things, where do they go? Is there a compartment in our brain that they slot perfectly into? Is it a room? I could imagine a mind palace. If it was a palace I suppose it could be like the British Museum with its loft glass ceilings that spiral and dizzy and make your head hurt when you think a second too deeply about where it got its artefacts from. When my hand moves along the plaques like a reader, it gets stopped very suddenly. There is a pause. But it feels terribly forced. Why does the sentence stop at “Ancient Mesopotamia”? If I had a pair of scissors I would completely cut out and remove every written plaque. Fuck trying to understand where the objects came from. Sit in the unknown. In the silence. Ignore all kinds of attempts to make sense. Sit in that blinding, sleep deprivation light. The glass ceilings break like a crystal ball. They shatter, raining down vicious shards onto all the objects that sit, unnamed. Tiny, impossible to see bits of glass cut open leather and stone. In this parallel universe, there are no objects rained down upon by glass. The shelves sit empty, dark. No spotlights. No white fucking walls. You wander around this great building. Punch after punch. Nothing. The pain is disappeared. No longer hidden out of view. Just gone. Who would want to walk around this empty, broken building? There’s nothing there. Maybe, we could use this empty house. Beating against those white walls. Fists pounding as they close in on me. I hate the feeling of being trapped. Under a painful white light, that shines right through, as though I’m no longer opaque. I can be looked through, like a piece of cling film. I look almost plastic under this harsh light and setting. I look produced. Like a material, disposable object that cannot be reused or recycled. I’m a product of extraction and ecological decimation. I can break just as easily. Wasn’t made to last. Wasn’t made to hold up the weight of this light. This light that illuminates every part that I want to hide. Everything comes to the foreground. That which is darkest, that which is most disgusting and foul. Like shiny, new plastic organs on show. A separated, categorised body. Heart and liver on display.