Live Performance 11 March, 7pm
Sam Keogh will activate his collaged drawing in the exhibition with a live performance which brings two of its characters into dialogue as they search to find the origin of ‘The Secret Identity Stamp of the Peasants’.
This installation of collaged drawings stems from The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of seven tapestries in The Met Cloisters, New York. Made in Flanders at the turn of the 16th century, these ornate tapestries have long been the subject of art historical debate over their meaning, iconography and provenance. Expropriated from their aristocratic owners during the French Revolution, they were later used to protect fruit trees and potatoes from frost or to keep horses warm in the winter months. They were later rediscovered and sold in the 1920s to JD Rockefeller Jr, who subsequently sold them to the Met. These events have added new layers of history to the tapestries’ surfaces, which undulate with areas of damage and repair. This provisional quality is echoed by the artist’s use of blue painters’ tape as a material to stitch together, collage and draw connections across a range of imagery, including fantastical figures from The Lord of the Rings to a mysterious circular form described as ‘The Secret Identity Stamp of the Peasants’ in an old edition of Friedrich Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany. Across the lines of association made by Keogh – from Anduril’s Sentry cameras which use AI to spot migrant boats crossing into the UK, to material drawn from the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection – the artist emphasises the mobility of images between revolution and control, between private power and peasant subterfuge.
Conspiracies
The culture and politics of our present have become subject to the rapid and shape-shifting spread of conspiracy. Offering seductive fictions that claim to expose the hidden machinations behind the organisation of power, the fantasies of conspiracy recur across cultural and political history. Today, their plots echo those of the past: driving political campaigns, distorting debates on public health, promoting racism and hatred of difference, contesting the authority of mainstream media, and cultivating moral panic. The reactionary logic of conspiracy claims to pose a challenge to the cultural and political establishment by attacking hierarchies of expertise and knowledge, while remaining in thrall to exclusionary authoritarianism. Yet the history of conspiracy is also the history of militancy, secret associations, and the possibility of unsettling received histories and the entrenched relations of power and capital.
Conspiracies presents four contemporary artists working at the seam of knowledge, conspiracy and cultural memory: Hannah Black, Caspar Heinemann, Sam Keogh, and Shenece Oretha, and asks them to respond to the Warburg Institute’s collections. These four artists draw upon objects and visual histories that engage with fate and fortune, myth and reality, as well as the associative structure of knowledge prized by Aby Warburg. Here, conspiracy becomes a mode of storytelling, assembling unruly associations between materials and histories, presenting it not only as a pathology of our present but as a counterflow to the experience of political disorientation.
Curated by Larne Abse Gogarty, Associate Professor and Head of History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, and author of What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023).
