Week 5's changes: some views

Week 5 is the second week in which major changes to the exhibition took place in this week, all of the works from the JAG collection that remained in the exhibition from their installation right at the beginning of the project were removed and replaced with a selection of works and archival material that probe the possibilities of loss, erasure and reversal as archival fuctions. This phase of the exhibition features two stolen paintings from the JAG collection: Pienture 6 - 59  by Pierre Solages (which was stolen around 1990 and turned up on a Christies auction in London in 1997) and the Studio El Greco painting St Thomas, which was cut out of its frame (displayed in the exhibition) in 2002.

Surrounding these works is a nest of written material gleaned from the JAG archives - newspaper clippings, letters between former JAG staff members, Christies and police investigators and internal JAG reports. It's interesting reading. What I have found troubling, though, is how few visitors to the exhibition bother with text when it is displayed alongside pictures. They head straight for the pictures. Of course, reading text is widely thought to be more work than looking at pictures, but I think this tendency points to habits of looking in galleries: we tend to consume pictures without thinking of the possibilities of looking through them or around them. We don't doubt them enough.

Anyway, here are some more views of the exhibition in its present state. Next change: April 6.

An installation view of Time's Arrow in week 5-6. 

In the distance, that's James Sey's video installation Submlimation and Reversibility. 

 

Each week Serge-Alain Nitegeka's work Equilibrium has been fleeing the

encroaching erasing line stipulated by Rodan-Kane Hart's work Developments of Space.

 This and the two pictures below are of an installation in progress by Alexandra Makhlouf. The artist began this work as an interaction with the books on the reading table, which were originally part of Chaaya Dubashi's installation Snoop. As the work progressed, she introduced a selection of novels which she felt resonated with the themes of the exhibition and is using material fromboth lots of books to create a growing bookscape in one corner of the exhibition.

Below are Makhlouf's modified copies of Samuel Beckett's Molloy and Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium.