Maternal Exhumations, 60 Curzon Street, London. Curated by Piero Tomassoni, 2023.
Square grids were used in archaeological excavations in Palestine to exhume bodies, vessels, tomb goods, and other valuable artefacts from the subterranean depths of the holy land. Hundreds of thousands of these artefacts were then looted by multiple global institutions over the course of the last century. The labour of excavation was taken on by Palestinian women usually from the village itself. Most of the time these women were also the landowners and those who nurtured the ground with their own hands as farmers. This 9 square grid installation is an ode to those women and an experiment in imagining the vessels returning to their soil. The second iteration of Maternal Exhumations was commissioned by Artvisor for this exhibition.
Maternal Exhumations, Doris McCarthy Gallery. Curated by Ingrid Jones, 2022.
Maternal Exhumations, Doris McCarthy Gallery, 2022.
Curated by Ingrid Jones.
Ghosts are replicas of displaced archaeological glass artifacts from Greater Syria currently stored or displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. 8 vessels are replicated in collaboration with professional forgers and glassblowers in Palestine that work on producing forgeries for the black market and the antiquities market in Palestine. By working with them, and bringing their craftsmanship to an exhibition space, we blur the boundaries between the ways in which value is applied to museum objects and antiquities. The vessels are toilet flasks, historically used by women for rituals of cleansing and healing. The objects are placed within a grid of soil as if they were just excavated in an homage to the Palestinian women that were used by western institutions to do the physical labour of digging.
Collateral Talk: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/events/2022/jul/maternal-exhumations