Aesthetic Bind: Cabinet Closet Wunderkammer: 50 Years of Chemould | Group Show

There are small exhibitions within this exhibition compacted by a set of framing devices. The Closet holds intimate things: clothes, mementos, secrets about self and identity, fears or even crimes. Glass-fronted Cabinets display objects ranging from books and photos to miscellaneous exotica referred to as ‘curiosities’. A Cabinet of Curiosities can expand into a room ─ an aristocrat’s private chamber, an archivist or voyager or collector’s humble storage. From the 15th century, the Wunderkammer (literally, Room of/ for Wonder) appears as a prototype of the museum ─ crammed with objects, hung with pictures from floor to ceiling. Museums have long and varied histories; the public museum, for example, is linked with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the development of the public domain, and the state’s undertaking to offer culture as education. Replete with local and regional heritage, museums become national institutions that proudly display a wealth of artifacts gained from colonial conquests ─ the loot in the fold of Europe’s ‘age of discovery’.

A curatorial invitation to a set of artists referencing museological formats, led me to further invite artists inclined to grim rather than vivid aspects of the container-collection-display equation. This brought in the vault, crypt, archive, lab and musty storage space that subverts pleasure, creates claustrophobia and veers away from the Wunderkammer into darker zones. But we know that in the richly mixed desires of the unconscious, objects, artifacts, totems and memento mori morph into each other. So I try to build for Cabinet Closet Wunderkammer an exhibitory phenomenology with entangled frames, container spills and aesthetic overlays.

-Geeta Kapur