Tabula Rasa Gallery
Unit One, 99 East Road, Hoxton
London N1 6AQ
Too Loud A Dust
Musquiqui Chihying
31. May - 29. June 2023
Tue - Sat 12:00-18:00
Closed on Sun and Mon
Tabula Rasa Gallery is excited to announce Too Loud A Dust, the latest solo exhibition by Berlin & Taipei-based artist Musquiqui Chihying, opening on 31 May 2023 at the gallery's London location. As the former artist-in-residence of the Delfina Foundation, Chihying’s research-based exhibition tackles the question of how to clean a museum, a complex issue that requires a diverse range of technical skills, such as dusting, microbial sampling, analysis, and preservation methods. The exhibition highlights how dust accumulation in display cabinets contains valuable information, such as the presence of biological species in the exhibition area and potential risks to the collections. Given the significance of environmental indicators in exhibition areas, museums specialising in human anthropology and natural history require meticulous monitoring, making museum cleaning intrinsically linked to the preservation of collections and the maintenance of exhibitions.
Beyond the physical space, anthropologist Mary Douglas has revealed the complex symbolic meanings of ‘purity,’ which encompass culture, rituals, and identity politics, with ambiguous concepts of cleanliness and dirtiness. Too Loud a Dust exhibition aims to present the latest works by Musquiqui Chihying, who has long explored the social functionality of museums, against the backdrop of a paradigm shift in museum politics.
Chihying’s research, conducted during the pandemic period at the Delfina Foundation, delves into two events from 1910: the construction of the Formosa Hamlet by the Japanese Empire at the Japanese-British Exhibition in London, and the publication of ‘Diseases of China: Including Formosa and Korea’ by British missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell in the same year. The exhibition, in collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, aims to reevaluate the complex relationships among displays, images, and ideological constructions, employing perspectives from microbiology and pathology.
Installation view @ Tabula Rasa Gallery
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