Cemetery: Book and exhibition
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32101
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Multi-component output: a collection of creative and critical work on a related topic that address different aspects of a single project and are collectively greater than the sum of their parts
- Open access status
- -
- Month
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- Year
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Cemetery is about a collection of significant thinkers, makers, and individuals that have had a profound impact on collective thought. Starting from, and relying on, my own mental archive, it is an investigation into how mutual thought processes are formed and informed, how canons are created, who is allowed into the canon, how they form themselves into communal inspiration, and how rehearsals of canons have the tendency to reinforce the power of particular thought. Given that canons are not necessarily the same for all people, with geography, social position, education, and class relationships having a profound impact on the way individuals structure their imaginations, define that which is intellectually significant, and accept ideas valuable enough to affect the construction of their lives.
Cemetery is about the racialisation and nationalisation of The Canon, how particular names and persons are easily included in The Canon, in direct rejection of others, and how the ever temporary possession of power determines the archive filled with material made dead by apparent flattening timelessness. The two publications attached to Cemetery are explorations of the archive and a codification of the collection, they seek to question entitlement expressed in the normalisation and naturalness of those in the archive after the fact, based on assumptions and unstated codes of what it takes to achieve inclusion in The Canon.
On installation, Cemetery showed how different knowledge systems emerge, and how names [in this case, last names only, along with dates of life] meant completely different things to an audience treated as homogeneous by power brokers capable of deciding and demanding acceptable scopes of intelligence by being able to dismiss all that is unfamiliar to themselves, while giving themselves leave to expand set limits when it is advantageous to their needs.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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