Twenty Bridges
- Year2015
- LocationMuseum of London
The commission was made possible by funding from Arts Council England.
“In order for waste products that have lost their primary context of use to have any chance of an afterlife in an archive or a museum, they must possess something of the relic, which resists the ravages of time by its robust materiality. Moreover, archives and rubbish dumps can be interpreted as emblems and symptoms for cultural remembrance and oblivion.” (Assmann, 2002, p. 71)
Twenty Bridges was an exhibition commissioned by the Museum of London in 2015. The exhibition used a large LED curtain and display monitor to imagine a flooded River Thames submerging the museum. Artefacts from the museum's collection, as well as mundane items found within present day London, swirl as historical flotsam. Against the backdrop of ecological catastrophe Twenty Bridges brings the significant into contact with the quotidian - querying the entangled status of both.
The last image is a record of a final gesture: a donation of the artist's personal objects (a pair of boots) into the museum's archive.
Assmann, A. (2002) 'Beyond the Archive', in B. Neville and J. Villeneuve (eds) Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. State University of New York Press.