Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Hastings 15 September – 2 January
Reviewed by: Anna Dumitriu
Hastings Museum houses an eclectic collection of art and historical objects ranging from stuffed birds to native American artifacts. The venue provides a fitting backdrop for one of three simultaneous exhibitions entitled 'Acknowledged Sources', also showing at Nottingham Castle Museum and Russell-Cotes Art Gallery in Bournemouth. The three exhibitions explore the impact of cross-cultural influences upon the work of particular artists, and look more generally at the sorts of relationships contemporary artists and makers can develop with museums.
In Hastings, three artists have produced site-specific installations within the museum. Jivan Astfalck, jeweller and installation artist, has clearly been affected by the museum's display about a local man known as Grey Owl – whose story has recently been made into a film. Astfalck's piece describes a little girl's fantasy to become a native American. A delicate, extended daisy chain of metal flowers, bones and pearls is draped across one wall, evoking childhood memories and dreams. In contrast Lynn Setterington's roughly made charcoal wall drawings, copied from an old museum catalogue, are more to do with value.
Most powerful for me are Lubna Chowdhary's three cabinets containing a collection of commemorative ceramics that deliberately intertwine fact and fiction and where printed scenes from the British Empire are overlaid onto insipid, charity-shop style pottery. The works blend so well into the setting of Hasting's Durbar Hall that it is initially difficult to distinguish them from the museum's permanent collection.
Chowdhary's work is most interesting because it examines the darker side of collecting – reminding the viewer that many artefacts in UK museum collections today were in fact stolen from other cultures by our ancestors.
Writer detail:
ANNA DUMITRIU
is an artist and critic.
Venue detail:
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