...Waswo X Waswo critiques this process of "museumification" that elides the value of various objects by delimiting and constraining their meaning through a myopic lens....
In Sleeping Through the Museum the artist Waswo X. Waswo and his collaborators raise a wide set of questions that invite us to rethink the function and purpose of the museum. As an institution that selects and preserves specific cultural knowledge by discarding that which it deems meaningless and not museum-worthy, the museum acts as an organ that not only creates but also assigns meaning and "value" to various objects. Waswo X Waswo critiques this process of "museumification" that elides the value of various objects by delimiting and constraining their meaning through a myopic lens. Museumification is "a process that transforms a place/object into a piece of heritage by preserving the past, and is manifested with reconstructions and recreations" (Brolin & Larsson, 2011). It is this process of transformation of an object into one defined as having a cultural heritage value that Waswo interrogates. He parodies the process of museumification to reveal the deeper implications of this process of creating notions of value (and by extension lack of value) by preserving and discarding selected objects. This is a selection process that risks hypostatizing and distorting that which it purports to represent. The title of the show thus invokes the concept of "sleep" to highlight the unintended ignorance and even distorting nature of the process of curating objects and "putting them in their place" within the museum context.
- Amjad Majid