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In response to Dr Kiddey’s talk, Maryam’s video makes a connection between the objects that people choose to surround themselves with and carry with them, and those objects displayed in museums. The question is: whose stories are we telling here and to what end? Bringing the ‘museum worthy’ into relation with the personal and the everyday, Maryam’s work prompts the viewer to imagine how histories and perceptions of places and people might change if someone else was telling the story.
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1) I open and close the drawers. Every drawer is heaving with stuff. What is all this stuff? A passport photo from 1986, empty cassettes, a receipt for a Safeway food shop, a postcard from France, East German Marks, a bookmark from a Dutch museum.
2) I tell my mother that this is immigrant mentality. She refuses to accept this. But I've seen it before, I insist, in the houses of my family, my friends; those who come, hoard.
3) Instead she tells me about a theory which exists in psychoanalysis: a displaced person, detached from their homeland, seeks to replace it, to locate it within the objects they bring with them. They're trying to replace ✨ the lost mother ✨
4) In a show and tell of important objects, she brought in her identity card. The document which documented her.
5) There’s a joke on tiktok where people go to the British Museum in the quest to find something British, but it’s full of stuff that's not British. Yet it all comes with paperwork, it’s all documented, so the museum can hoard it, it’s legit. Like my mother.
6) I look behind each glass cabinet, one by one. What is all this stuff? A jade pot, a clay cylinder, a painted figure, an ENTIRE marble staircase. Each object comes with a label saying things like, ‘the Egyptian pharaoh is painted black because black was thought to bring luck’ or ‘museum number 90920’. But the cylinder says something like, “𒅀𒋾𒅀𒀸𒄿𒄑”
7) Azoulay tells us this: The establishment of Western museums on the idea of democratisation - the promise to enable citizens to enjoy the common wealth - implies that citizen’s rights are anchored in objects deposited in public institutions. However, the inscription of privileged citizens’ rights (mainly white Western citizens) in institutions established with labour extracted from non-Western peoples whose rights were denied through them, even though their objects form a constitutive part of their wealth, is inseparable from the inscription of this violence in these objects.
8) those objects carry our rights
when they’re taken
so does what they give us
we follow them to those places
where we’re left at the borders
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Images (from top to bottom): Screenshot of Google search results for 'are immigrants hoarders' by Ayeneh; screenshot of TikTok video by @theafricandiary depicting a European monument made of metal that the user has discovered and named 'Chungu Ya Mafuta'; a photograph of a stone plaque on Shush Castle in Iran built by Jacques de Morgan who 'invented petrol in Iran'. The castle was built using the stones of the ruins of the ancient city. It was where French archeologists lived while they 'explored' the region.
Video Credits: @garagegla; Through the Keyhole, Yorkshire Television, 1991; Parvin, Ghoghaye Setaregan, 1976; britishmuseum.org; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History, 2019; Ayeneh, Negeen, Javad.
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