Stolen Artifact
We're showing a new work this month at Kotti-Shop, Berlin {www.kotti-shop.net} - as part of a project called The Minimuseum of XXI Century Arts, curated by Domenico Quaranta. The museum is basically a 7" digital photo frame which passes from artist to artist with each one adding a work to the museum collection (ie a 4bg memory stick) before passing it on to a recipient of their choice. Our own addition is a piece called Stolen Artifact which we filmed at the Neues Museum, Berlin earlier this year. The work opens next Saturday, 25 June 2011 from 19:00 - 21:00 and is then on show, by appointment till 9 July. Contact info@kotti-shop.net to arrange a viewing. This from the press release...
Stolen Artifact takes as its starting point the observation that many of the world's museums have, over the years, built their collections from the outright or covert theft of other people's cultural heritage. The return of these objects is an ongoing discussion for many western museums and the communities which claim them and it seemed fitting that we should provide the Minimuseum of XXI Century Art with its own Stolen Artifact. So we made a short 'guerilla' film of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, Berlin - itself an artifact which the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities are very keen to have returned. Beyond the idea that all 'real' museums need to have some stolen goods on show is the fact that our theft, ie the 'illegal' recording of an image against the orders of the institution, contravenes not the ownership of the object itself but the Neues Museum's ownership of that object's image. (postcards are, of course, on sale in the shop) As such Stolen Artifact is both a video of a stolen object (Nefertiti) and is itself an act of theft whose artifacts, the jagged blotches from this iphone video, are concerned with entirely different questions of ownership.
and for those of you who aren't in Berlin for the celebrations- here's a copy of the work on YouTube
Stolen Artifact takes as its starting point the observation that many of the world's museums have, over the years, built their collections from the outright or covert theft of other people's cultural heritage. The return of these objects is an ongoing discussion for many western museums and the communities which claim them and it seemed fitting that we should provide the Minimuseum of XXI Century Art with its own Stolen Artifact. So we made a short 'guerilla' film of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, Berlin - itself an artifact which the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities are very keen to have returned. Beyond the idea that all 'real' museums need to have some stolen goods on show is the fact that our theft, ie the 'illegal' recording of an image against the orders of the institution, contravenes not the ownership of the object itself but the Neues Museum's ownership of that object's image. (postcards are, of course, on sale in the shop) As such Stolen Artifact is both a video of a stolen object (Nefertiti) and is itself an act of theft whose artifacts, the jagged blotches from this iphone video, are concerned with entirely different questions of ownership.
and for those of you who aren't in Berlin for the celebrations- here's a copy of the work on YouTube