Agents of Deterioration

When applying risk management strategies to museum collections, risk is broken down according to ten agents of deterioration that pose threats to collections. Nine of these risks are physical (physical forces, fire, water, criminals, pests, pollutants, light, incorrect temperature, and incorrect humidity) and the tenth is custodial neglect, for example where a collection item may be disassociated from provenance. Museums generally suspend objects from use, touch and intervention in order to freeze or hold things in a state of torpor, preventing interactions in order to preserve. Many Indigenous peoples challenge the idea of preservation as a greater good, instead affirming the right to renew and use, enliven and care for objects as part of community life.

The Prisoners of Love (PoL) project aims to connect UK collection items with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex histories and material practices. The group have been working with the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew; Horniman Museum and Gardens and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai; India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana in Accra; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and the Mootookakio’ssin project on Blackfoot homelands at the ULethbridge, Alberta, Canada.

In September this year UK project participants shared a residency at OPENing, the Art Programme artist-led space in Bank. The OST residency exhibition was documented as a 25min video by Helen Robertson and produced OSTzine with essays by Lennon Mhishi and Esi Eshun.

Work developed at OPENing was subsequently exhibited at the Hess Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Canada. The exhibition Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime, was developed in partnership with the Indigenous Art Program at UoL.

This current exhibition invited contributions from all project participants.

• https://artgallery.uleth.ca/mootookakios...
• https://www.conceptshaveteeth.com/
• https://openingcsm.cargo.site/OST-23-24
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9kfhpdQ...