[spectre] "Stolen Artifact" by Crowe and Rawlinson at the MINI Museum

[Domenico Quaranta]

The MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts is proud to announce the launch of  
the second site-specific project designed for its low cost, itinerant  
architecture: Stolen Artifact, by Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson. The  
piece will be on view from Saturday, June 25 to July 9 (by  
appointment) at Kotti-Shop, Berlin.

Stolen Artifact takes as its starting point the observation that many  
of the world's museums have, over the years, built their collections  
from the outright or covert theft of other people's cultural heritage.  
«The return of these objects is an ongoing discussion for many western  
museums and the communities which claim them – the artists explain –  
and it seemed fitting that we should provide the MINI Museum of XXI  
Century Art with its own Stolen Artifact. So we made a short  
“guerilla” film of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, Berlin –  
itself an artifact which the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities are  
very keen to have returned. Beyond the idea that all “real” museums  
need to have some stolen goods on show is the fact that our theft,  
i.e. the “illegal” recording of an image against the orders of the  
institution, contravenes not the ownership of the object itself but  
the Neues Museum's ownership of that object's image (postcards are, of  
course, on sale in the shop). As such Stolen Artifact is both a video  
of a stolen object (Nefertiti) and is itself an act of theft whose  
artifacts, the jagged blotches from this iphone video, are concerned  
with entirely different question of ownership.»

Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson (http://www.croweandrawlinson.net) are  
based in Berlin and Manchester and have worked collaboratively since  
1994. Their work is primarily concerned with the languages of power,  
with its grammar and with its rhetoric. Projects address questions  
around faith, politics, national identity and the environment. Their  
video and sculptural works create an encounter with the viewer that  
focuses on the complexity of objects and actions in relation to their  
social contexts. Works like The Fireworks, The Carriers' Prayer or The  
Four Horsemen operate though an unravelling of the social and  
ideological consequences of an action in regard to its apparent  
spectacle. This interest in consequence is reflected in the aesthetics  
of spectacle and excess that sit at the heart of their practice . Solo  
exhibitions include The Fireworks, Isolation Room, St Louis, 2011; No  
Sign of Helicopters, Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, 2010, The Carriers  
Prayer, Newlyn Art Gallery, 2009 and At 25 Metres, FACT, Liverpool,  
2008. Group exhibitions include The Way We Do Art Now, Tanya Leighton  
Gallery, Berlin, 2010; Re-make/Re-model, National Glass Centre,  
Sunderland, 2010 – 2011; and Stranger Things are Happening, Aspex  
Gallery, Portsmouth, 2009.

The Kotti-Shop (http://www.kotti-shop.net) is a multi-faceted Kunst- 
und-so-weiter space with a focus on collaborative activity and based  
in the NKZ (Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum) in Berlin, Germany.

Stolen Artifact on YouTube: http://youtu.be/_qGSyn1quRQ
More info: http://blog.theminimuseum.org/


---

Domenico Quaranta

Director, The MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts

web. http://www.theminimuseum.org
email. director at theminimuseum.org