2053: A Living Museum (2016)
Guitar and Vocal Sonic Rememberance
Composed by Anna Jane Houghton, Performed by Anna Jane Houghton and Hazel Davis
16 Minutes
Representative of Walid Raad’s Secrets in the Open Sea (1993)
TATE Liverpool
It’s 2053. All of the artworks in Tate Liverpool’s special exhibition An Imagined Museum have vanished, replaced by a ‘living museum’ an army of people assembled to preserve the memory of the artworks that were once on display, curated by Francesco Manacorda.
2053: A Living Museum is the extraordinary conclusion of Tate Liverpool’s special exhibition, An Imagined Museum: works from the Centre Pompidou, Tate and MMK collections. Following the closure of the exhibition on Sunday 14 February 2016, the exhibition will reopened on 20 February 2016 with the artworks removed, replaced by a person or group remembering or performing each of the artworks that were once on display. An Imagined Museum and 2053: A Living Museum draw on Ray Bradbury’s book, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), where characters become a living library of banned books to preserve their content for future generations.
Above: 2052
Below: Waalid Raad , Secrets in the Open Sea (1993)
Secrets In The Open Sea (2016) is a performative response to Walid Raad’s Secrets In The Open Sea (1993), which consists of twenty-nine photographic prints that were found buried under the rubble during the 1993 demolition of Beirut’s war-ravaged commercial districts. The prints are varying shades of blue and each measured 111 x 173 cm, and in 1994, the prints were entrusted to The Atlas Group for preservation and analysis, the laboratories recovered small black-and-white latent images from the blue prints. The images depicted group portraits of men and women, all identified as individuals who drowned in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991. The corresponding artwork is presented as a tonal wall of the enlarged blue prints, with the black and white photographs associated with each image positioned in a footnote fashion in the right hand corner of each print. Both methodologies of the exhibition itself and Raad’s work, engage with storytelling to expose the gap between verification and comprehension of historical knowledge, and position memory as a tool for the preservation of history. This engages with the aforementioned living knowledge, that is deeply woven into the sub-conscious, which facilitates a new materialist ontology in which there are no structures, systems or mechanisms at work; instead there are innumerable 'events' comprising the material effects of both nature and culture, which together produce the sounding world and human history.
