| Description | 2 x b&w photographs of Case 1 from 'Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Nahuatl', exhibition (touring version), 1988-89.
The exhibition created by Eduardo Paolozzi for the Museum of Mankind and toured by the South Bank Centre to Birmingham City Art Gallery (1 April-22 May); Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery (4 June-31 July); York City Art Gallery (13 August - 2 October); Bolton Museum and Art Gallery (15 October - 17 December); Leeds City Art Gallery (12 January-5 March 1989).
According to Paolozzi the case of the photograph is based on the idea of the packing case and it serves as a metaphor for the whole exhibition. "The packing case as a phenomenon has its own history. Such cases were used to send machinery and food to places like West Africa; perhaps the same boxes were then used to send back curios, because in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ethnography was a matter partly a matter of the collection of curios.[...] I 've tried to select some things that aren' t beautiful, that wouldn' t be seen in a Sotheby's catalogue -such as the hand-made mud brick, which still bears the impressions of its maker's fingers, and the hide scraper, which I thought was rather 'ungly' [...]. (From Untitled Introduction to the abbreviated catalogue,np. (21illus.). |