Object to Project
Artists’ Inter-ven-tions in Existing Museum Collections.

This is the manifesto of Look Exhibition Design. It was commissioned by the Henry Moore Foundation to reflect on our experience of working with contemporary art in the museum. Here we posit that when contemporary artists intervene in museums exhibitions they intervene ‘between past and future’ ways of seeing, thereby turning museum objects into projects.
The hyphenation of inter-vent-ion in the title is to define the inter-venire as literally between-coming, or the catalytic space of display being in between museum and sculpture, bringing both together. With these thus linked, the participation of contemporary viewers begins and museum conventions themselves become an artistic project interpenetrated by histories and interpolated with sculpture.
In this chapter you can explore with us how contemporary artistic interventions employ those human senses that come between and ultimately join the sculptural body and the viewing body. Intervening with light, smell, sound, or other ephemeral markings, interventions reframe the frames of display.

Sculpture and the Museum, Christopher Marshall (ed),
London, Ashgate Press, 2010.

Small Mirrors to Large Empires
Towards a theory of meta-museums in contemporary art.

Presenting my experience and strategies as a researcher and artist working for six years between the Peabody Museum at Harvard University and the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology this was a paper originally comissioned by CIHA for their congress. In contemporary art’s appropriations of artifacts I identify a new museology emerging. These ‘meta’ treatments of museum conventions propose alternatives to paradigms that exist in the large Guggenheims and university museums of Archeology and Ethnology. I to their strategies to learn how they might be adapted to museum displays. Through defamiliarization meta-museums represent an affront to the colonial science of taxonomy. The desire to blur subject and object in contemporary encounters between artist and history intersects with the museal representation of memories in public space. Curatorially radical uses of spectacle, memory, the unknown or ‘peripheral’ level the value of the artistic material and its frontiers both geographically and in the canon of art history.

Economies of desire: art collecting and dealing across cultures, in Crossing Cultures, 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), Jaynie Anderson (ed.), Melbourne University Press, 2009.

Curating Curiosity
Wonder’s Colonial Phenomenology

We pursue the curiosity, wonder, and enchantment at the center of our work, to paraphrase Joseph Beuys, because ‘in places like museums, where everyone talks too rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear’. We propose that this enchanter might be the contemporary artist who picks up these objects, for which, to quote Phillippe Peltier, ‘no words can adequately capture the meaning … unspoken in their purpose, to seek to comprehend them is to lend an ear to other voices’. What emerges is a stimulating discussion of the problem of embodied space and situated consciousness. 'How space – mental, emotional, visual – is implicated in our constructions of reality and our art is the focus of this set of innovative essays.' – Rodopi New York

Frameworks, Artworks, Place, Timothy Mehigan (ed.), Amsterdam, Rodopi Press, 2008, pp. 203-225.

"In her pathforging work Khadija Z Carroll has the historical knowledge and theoretical sophistication to bring the display of art together in a thoughtful and engaging way, she is a person of great intelligence and vision."

-Suzanne Preston Blier, Curator of African Art and Identity and author of Art of the Senses


Critical Praise for Curating Curiosity

"The concluding essays offer particularly revealing in-depth investigations of the strategies of the display and experience of art as part of the post-modern construction of "discontinuous historical realities" (Bhabha's phrase, p. 217). Carroll identifies in her investigation of colonial acts of renaming "the inability to grasp matched with a desire to control" and thus, possess (p. 214). Such realities, therefore, have been the product of the non-neutral act of renaming and the classification of cultural material for construction of desirable evidence. That mechanism of fabricating knowledge aims at diffusing the original value and context of any cultural material that is too novel and unique and thus exceeds existing social and scientific norms and expectations."

Eugenia Fratzeskou, ‘Frameworks, Artworks, Place: The Space of Perception in the Modern World’, review of Khadija Z Carroll, ‘Curating Curiosity: Wonder’s Colonial Phenomenology’, Leonardo Review, MIT Press, 42 (1) February, 2009, pp. 86-87.

 

Of Originals:
Colonial History and Contemporary Australian Art

In the cross-cultural exchanges made within the nineteenth century colonies, images were produced and used to communicate when there was no common language. Of Originals analyzes these visual art practices in the legal domain and scientific context: during war in the penal colonies, European science and classification, the settlement of land, trade, and the burgeoning interest in the first nations’ cultures. Of Originals reads drawing as a generative model of communication, rather than a thing fixed at the moment of inscription or embodiment. Each of its five case studies works to counter several unfortunate modernist legacies. Presenting the maps, notes of indigenous language, paintings, engravings, dances and rituals by indigenous and colonial artists between 1803 and 1901, the thesis proves that art, architecture, and history developed in Australia before colonization. Of Originals finds that the British occupiers of the continent held a linear, Euclidean conception of space. This sequential understanding of space and time is analyzed in an early discussion of the British administration of Van Diemen’s land. This case serves to highlight the less linear understandings of the concepts discussed through the whole book. The focus is on material culture that understands time as a fourth dimension. In the process, the European colonial assumption that new terrain may simply be known, and mapped and therefore conquered is questioned.

© 2009 Khadija La