Relocating the Remains

“One of the central concerns of Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains and, indeed, of his work over the past fifteen years has been to do with interrogating history, excavating the remnants of the past. Piper has also been questioning the very nature of history in terms of both its form and its content. His work does not rewrite history or map out an alternative, unambiguous historical narrative but rather seeks to problematize the very notion of a coherent, linear historical trajectory. The complex layering of image, sound and text which Piper exploits so eloquently in his work through his use of multimedia technology, does not seek to explain or resolve the gaps and fissures which are exposed by ‘official’ histories. As we apprehend the fleeting images, sounds and texts in Relocating the Remains, we are not presented with any answers but rather a sense of the parallel, intersecting narratives which make up what is called history. Piper presents us with a palimpsest of narratives; layer upon layer of images, sounds and texts which intersect and overlap. There are fragments here of Western history and art history, of Piper’s own history as a black man and as an artist. They are all inextricably linked.

Relocating the Remains is an artistic project which challenges the fundamental rules of the art historical game. It is a ‘retrospective’ project but one which does not follow a clear chronological line. Over a period of fifteen years, the artist has revisited key themes time and again and images, even works, are constantly reworked and re-presented.

A conventional retrospective was impossible, not least because so many of the artist’s early works have been damaged, disappeared or have been dismantled. Nothing remains of the works which once existed except photographs. And Piper has quite literally ‘relocated’ the remains of his own practice as well as relocating the remains of a number of complex, intersecting fragments of different historical narratives. Piper is both artist and archivist, relocating history according to his own categories: UnRecorded; UnMapped; UnClassified. Relocating his artistic past according to his own categories, Piper allows you to follow a ‘timeline’ of his artistic oeuvre except that this ‘timeline’ leads you sideways and diagonally, in and out and across time. The artwork acts as an archive of a living past, one through which each viewer navigates their own path; a collection of fragments which you can piece together into your own story but which never makes up a single, coherent linear narrative.

Despite the revolutionary claims made on behalf of new technology that it will fundamentally alter our lives and empower us in radical new ways, the digital dreams of an utopian cyberspace have yet to be realized. But it is what is happening in the gaps and fissures of this new digitalized hegemony which is the most interesting. In music, film and the visual arts, artists and writers have taken up new technology because it has come to be viewed as the representative form for articulating the diasporan experience. Fragmented, dissonant, layered and non-linear, cyberspace appears to be the quintessential diasporan space.”

From ‘Telling Tales: Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains’, first published in Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains, London: Iniva, 1997, produced to coincide with the exhibition Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains which was presented at the Royal College of Art, London (18 July–13 August 1997).