On the Enclosure of Time (#1-11)

Sculptural Installation

2014

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Time, Trade and The Exotic, (1 of 3), CCS Bard / Hessel Museum, NY, US (2016)

Drawing on the language of museum display, the installation On the Enclosure of Time speculates on current global socio-political issues and suggests possible future scenarios.

The collection of 11 individual works within the installation references a range of diverse, urgent subjects, such as the current economic crisis, the end of the capitalist growth model, ecological processes, and rhizomatic forms of knowledge distribution.  Together, they propose strange and fantastical juxtapositions and create links with modernism, colonial history, museum display, and the aesthetics and narratives of sci-fi.

Installation at the Wisbech Museum, one of the oldest purpose-built museums in the UK (2014) In the background of the photo there is a display on the campaign of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

The collection is playing with the sweeping generalizations evident in museum texts in which unfathomably vast periods of history are encapsulated within an all-encompassing narrative. Titles like About 40 Billion, The Beginning and the End, and The Present is Now Appearing are all taken from museum labels, which present a scenario that is at once impossible to imagine and strangely pedantic.

On the Enclosure of Time
Installation with 11 individual sculptures
Materials: wood, glass, rope, paint, felt, glass domes, metal
Various sizes
Produced for: History Rising

‘On the Enclosure of Time’ is one of the outcomes of ‘History Rising,’ a subversive and engaging study of museum display in England, conceived and developed by Marjolijn Dijkman and curator Jes Fernie (2012-2015). By distancing museum objects from their support structures, the project seeks to critique the assumptions that are made about how things are positioned, who choose to display them, and how the social, political, and aesthetic choices that are made in the process dictate the language of display.

A publication on ‘History Rising’ was published by Onomatopee in 2015.
Editors: Jes Fernie and Marjolijn Dijkman

 

The Beginning and The End, 2014
Victory Models (WWI, WWII, WWIII), 2014
Please Touch / Please Don't Touch, 2013
Extraordinary Properties, 2014
The Present is Now Appearing, 2014
Problems of Currency, 2014
What We Know of Them, 2014
New Horizons, 2014
The Everchanging, 2014
Finding an Identity, 2014