‘MUSEUM CLAUSUM’
As part of: JTP09 at
The Deptford Maritime Museum", an installation by the Museum Clausum, shows a selection of remarkable objects reflecting on Deptford’s historical link to England ’s maritime history. On display will be an eclectic collection of relics, that tell surprising stories of private, personal as well as local, national and international significance.
The Museum Clausum is a project by artist and collector, Klaus Wehner. The name is adopted from Sir Thomas Browne’s seventeenth-century pamphlet, Musaeum Clausum, which is a written inventory of a fantasy collection of objects and books, produced by Browne as an ironic comment on the Renaissance craze of assembling collections and producing wunderkammern. It is hence an early artistic and personal comment on the artificiality of museum-type display and knowledge. Wehner’s Museum Clausum, continues this project to reflect on our relationship to objects and museum and exhibition culture in general. The Museum Clausum has no fixed location and its aim is to stage temporary exhibitions in co-operation with different host institutions. A future project is a collaboration between Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Royal College of Surgeon’s Hunterian Museum for the project Museum Clausum, Autopsia in 2010. For further information visit: http://www.museumclausum.org
Contacts:
James Taylor Gallery: contact@jamestaylorgallery.co.uk
Fieldgate Gallery: fieldgategallery@gmail.com Links:
www.jamestaylorgallery.co.uk www.museumclausum.org
About Klaus Wehner and the Museum Clausum:
Museums have formed the main focus point of my artistic practice for many years and as part of this work I operate as a museum institution myself, the Museum Clausum. This name is a reference to a seventeenth-century pamphlet by Sir Thomas Browne, the Musaeum Clausum, which is a written inventory of a fantasy collection of objects and books, produced by Browne as an ironic comment on the Renaissance craze of assembling collections and producing wunderkammern. It is hence an early artistic and personal comment on the artificiality of museum-type display and knowledge. It is the intention of my modern day Museum Clausum to continue this project, mainly in collaboration with host institutions who, in turn, are being put on display by the Museum Clausum. Within Museum Clausum projects, I act as ‘collector’ or ‘curator’ and one declared aim is to bring to attention the relative artificiality of notions such as making art as opposed to collecting, curating and the according classifications of artefacts and their installation.
The museum is also the theme of my practical and theoretical research towards a practice-led PhD in Visual Arts, at Goldsmiths, University of London. Summarised very shortly, my writing focuses on the way objects are staged in any exhibition context and my investigation focuses on the tension between objects’ materiality and the viewer’s visual perception of staged objects. The Museum Clausum, Deptford, part of Deptford X in 2007 was the first successful Museum Clausum project, which reflected on the value of objects as relics both in a museum but also in a domestic context. A future project of the Museum Clausum will be a joint exhibition between Sir John Soane’s and the Hunterian Museum in London in 2010.
Some samples of my work can be seen at www.klauswehner.co.uk and also www.museumclausum.org.
