The Figure in the Carpet

The sorrow is in the curtains, the distress is in the vitrine, the pain is in the carpet and on the labels and the shelves, the authority is on the walls. For their exhibition at Blackwood Gallery, Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten take the ethnographic museum as a subject, exaggerating its repeated forms and revealing the “blueprints of distress” of its makers (to borrow from anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler). In Farooq and Linschooten’s treatment of museum display as an aesthetic medium, a complex space of social codes, ideological agendas, and haphazard protocols emerge from the glass. Proposing alternative models of display, this site-specific installation reflects on the ways by which cultural artifacts can be transformed into public knowledge, all the while recognizing that the fingerprints of the institution will always be on the material.