Vitreous Stories (August 2019)
Curated by Kirsty Kerr, Culture& Trainee Assistant Curator.
Participants: Daisy Chan, Museum of Croydon; Kirsty Kerr, Culture&; Qanitah Malik, National Trust London Creative Team and Vanessa Otim, Royal Collection Trust.
Objects: antique vitrine; paper cup inscribed with message from stranger; iPhone displaying image of ‘Feng You Jing’ medicated oil; birthday card from childhood friend; hair curling cream punctured with bite marks.
‘Vitreous Stories’ is the debut exhibition for our new micro-museum series, ‘The Case‘. It is also a collaborative response to ‘Vitreous Bodies’, a Culture& intervention that involved the installation of two persons, and a number of objects, within the so-called Number 9 vitrine at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
For this exhibition, each contributor was asked to provide an object that holds a story. These items were curated within ‘The Case’, generating new and unexpected relationships. Like the stories unlocked through the collation of items in ‘Vitreous Bodies’, ‘Vitreous Stories’ is an experiment in how new narratives might be formed from old ones placed in relationship to one another, via the objects that contain them.
About ‘The Case’
‘The Case’ is a new curated micro-museum series that raises questions about which objects are worthy of being collected and exhibited, what system(s) we use to group them together, and which narratives and questions arise when we do so. The exhibitions are set up in an antique vitrine, existing online only and curated by New Museum School trainees with invited guest artists and contributors.