Friday 1 April 2011

Collaboratively Collected Curation

Mark Dion Tate Thames Dig 1999

"This double-sided cabinet houses the artefacts retrieved during the Tate Thames Dig. One side contains items found at Millbank, the other those from Bankside. The cabinet is in the style of nineteenth-century display furniture still found in many museums. However, Dion has not labelled any of the objects, allowing the visitor to form their own ideas about them."

Dion's presentation allows a viewer to form their own meaningful dialogue through objects that required numerous people to collect and produce as the work. The project involved paid volunteers and other professionals and artists collaboratively finding, cleaning, sorting and presenting artifacts retrieved from the River Thames. This interesting creation/curation process questions authorship of art, interpretation of objects and the value given to art by attributing value to objects that were most recently forgotten on a riverbed. Funny to discover it now after having curated Collection(s) Part 1 where we aimed to provoke some similar approaches from the viewer. 

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