This provocative exhibition is comprised of two “bone books” made of horse skeletons and covered in hand-written texts, burnished in gold leaf, and shod in silver shoes. Three bridled horse skulls inscribed and leafed become cabinets for ephemeral objects and imagery clasped in the hands of priest figures dominating war landscapes.
Inscribed text references medieval and early modern Christianity from the first and second world war, and archival texts, produced in the 1870's in the now extinct Bushman language “ |xam.”
Through themes of sacrifice and redemption, the artist explores relic and archive in the context of writing and language, and considers the interchange between text and textuality, the visible and the invisible world.
The exhibition maps out the imaginary boundaries and landmarks of the miraculous history of the book, what it might look like, and where it might lead us in an ongoing journey.
Pippa Skotnes is the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the U-M Institute for the Humanities. She is professor of fine art and director of the Center for Curating the Archive at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Capetown, South Africa.
Professor Skotnes will be also be presenting the Wednesday Night Museums lecture “Curating the Archive: Representing Scattered Collections of the Colonial Past,” on December 2, 2009, 7:30, Helmut Stern Auditorium, University of Michigan Museum of Art.
A corresponding conference, “Archive, Museum, and the Safe House of Language” takes place on Thursday, December 3, 2009, 9am-4:30pm at the Institute for the Humanities, room 2022, 202 S. Thayer, Ann Arbor.