Professorial Research

LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE

(1998 -2004)

This doctoral research project spans conventional visual art practices, narrative, museology, literature, mythology, archeology and personal family history. It encapsulates the fluidity of movement between objects made, objects collected, objects reconstructed and objects reinterpreted through installations, performances and critical writing.  The construction of a specific exhibition space, The Museum of Cultural Anxiety (M.O.C.A.) in downtown Auckland enables the works to be shown in a public, yet somewhat alternative environment. By collecting, manufacturing and fabricating objects of curiosity and anxiety, along with those of little monetary or historical value, I have created a ‘museum of fiction’.

The transfer of objects from a private location to a public setting, while still bearing residual traces of ownership opens the way for an investigation into how new relationships between objects, artists and museums might be formed. For many, a museum collection is the accumulation of valuable and unique objects however a closer study shows all objects in a museum collection operate within a systemic framework, one that many contemporary artists have challenged in order to produce new configurations and new creative work.

Memory plays a significant part in museological research, as every material thing in a collection is a product of a time and a place. As memory is both personal and collective (and an act of thinking things in their absence), such critical analysis offers a plethora of possible artistic approaches as well as heightening the imagination and adding to the museum ‘experience’ for the spectator.  Blurring the lines between history and memory to give presence to a number of hidden narratives, and expanding the reservoir of cultural recordings and personal reminiscences, formed the core of the project.  Museum displays often attempt to ‘capture time’ and in doing so, fix the memory of entire cultures through representative objects in what appears to be an arbitrary selection process. Rather than providing definitive answers to questions of identity, representation and interpretation, new approaches challenge the spectator to look beyond the visual to imagine ‘absent bodies’ and see, for example, to what extent arbitrary taste, status and wealth have contributed to the invisibility of others.