ALL EMPIRES FALL

by MJ Turpin

06.10.22 - 17.11.22

Long Gallery

When the lights go out, a new history shines through.
Death leading to the decomposition of what we call ‘legacy’.
Bloated idealisations causing us to cling to putrid indoctrination
Or the industrializing (cleaning) of the commodified body.
Colonial legacy smelt rotten before we severed its head from its body

Following on his previous solo exhibition, take me apart (No End Contemporary Art Space), MJ Turpin’s extended body of work tries to re-animate itself and re-articulate what it has become since it was first shown in 2019. What does it mean to decapitate a legacy? How does one deconstruct privilege? Or rather what is left after legacy and privilege have been taken apart?

What previously was understood as a decontextualised ancient Greek objects (Decapitated Legacy) now from a different angle (Rotten I and II) reveals the decapitated head already bloated, already rotting. All Empires fall continues his previous work’s discourses surrounding deconstruction, the history and commodification of artifacts stolen from Africa, and the violence of the Western gaze.

The R5 coin on the eyes in At the onset of any meaningful revolution, heads must roll alludes to the bygone practice of placing coins on the eyes of the dead to assist with the travel of the deceased to the afterlife. The coins thus point towards inevitable change/transition of death and passing on. It was also, on a practical level, a way to stop the eyes of the dead from prying open during rigor mortis, in the case of this work what seems to initially point to denial of history is rather a refusal for the eyes (Western gaze) to continue opening/looking.

The process of taking apart history, the self and attempting to interrogate old narratives by visually and physically writing new ones, lies within the transitional quality of decomposition where new ways of being can grow.

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ALL EMPIRES FALL

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