Posted on
2014-09-15
John Murphy’s last exhibition in Trondheim kunstmuseum is the third in a line where contemporary artists are invited to exhibit side by side with works from the museum’s collection. In this way the collection will fold out in a new way each time, and different aspects will be emphasized depending on the selected works and thinking of the invited artist. Murphy’s part in the series is in its ways more profound than both the prior, as it is based on a thorough examination of the collection by the artist, and a larger space is used. OF VOYAGES, OF OTHER PLACES is staged in the whole first floor in TKM Bispegata.
We will say that in place of any tracery of the extant form s of the past, Murphy puts to work a « diagramming » of relations, a construction as a mapping of relations rather than forms, relations of forces that were never till now actualised, of spatio-temporal dynamisms that slice across the structured plane of historical time. Through these diagrams, it is not what we already know of the past that is brought back to us. It is not a return of the same past, but the return of the past in a form in which it never was, a « before » that is not what actually was, but returns as the unintelligible excess to past actuality. It is as diagrammatic method with its challenge to historical referentiality, it is as a relational practice with its challenge to the historical identity of the artwork, it is as transhistorical encounter that renders unrecognisable both elements of the collision whilst giving birth to something new, in which the provocation of Murphy’s work consists – a provocation that resists identification with the « contemporary » to produce new conduits of time.
Exhibition runs through to October 25th, 2014
Galerie Bernard Bouche
123 Rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris
galeriebernardbouche.com