The Museum Show
Dec 2011
PAVILION, THE LOST OBJECTS + THE MUSEUM OF NON PARTICIPATION
''In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall i attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions, I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales covers the roofs; but i already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.
The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past."
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
the museum of non participation (MONP) reveals the events of the past and of the developing future; PAVILION constructs the measurements of their space.
the museum of non participation in its beginnings has negated the need for site, for walls or institutions. the city becomes the museum, and the events and artefacts of the museum are found embedded in the fabric of the cities they nest in.
the cities of karachi, baghdad, london and cairo are exposed through resolutions, testimonies, collections, photographs and signs.
amongst the fragments of these events, PAVILION has staged an occupation with the fragments of the physical city.
we have plundered from the streets of these cities the building blocks of the unbuilding city, and here when the MNOP finds its uneasy place inside the gallery (as a non-museum) in a museum of museums, we deliver these building blocks; these LOST OBJECTS to invade the institution.
'tape drawing' stands propped on a concrete plinth, resembling a missing section of a frontier or road block.
a line is drawn in the dusty ground trying to reclaim a fraction of the city's floor plan for the events of the future.
does the line in fact draw the outline of the lost object?
the image object and the non-space it depicts are apparently re-united.
'torture memo' is heard from a seat found amongst an assembly of concrete cubes.
some appear to be sinking through the museum floor. reminiscent of coastal anti-tank blocks, the seats call the visitors to the museum to a forum.
PAVILION'S programme attempts to reframe the space of exhibition. we have been constructing alternative physical manifestations of 'the gallery'.
the proposal to 'intervene in the MONP' was one that enabled pavilion to address an idea central to our practice; the 'city as gallery', and to observe and erect an abstract model of the city to desecrate the institutional archetype.
through our collaboration with the MONP, PAVILION has attempted to deliver a series of lost objects from the unbuilt city that will be selected by the works themselves to function as the footings for the museum of non-participation.
