Climate Forum III – Readings

Working with a modern art museum’s collection is a little like how poet Koleka Putuma describes adulting in ‘Graduation’ from her book of poems Collective Amnesia (Cape Town: Manyano Media, 2nd Ed. 2020). As part of the museum’s insistence on evading the death and disintegration of materials through conservation, you invariably engage with the act of dying without grieving. Or, in Putuma’s terms, somewhere down the line of being grown-up you find a path toward being in harmony with a death/life cycle:

You realise the elders in the room
learned the alphabet of hurting and falling apart differently
For you, healing looks like talking and transparency
For them it is silence and burying
And both are probably valid

Artist and death researcher G and I are in an ongoing investigation about the question of how death and grieving can figure in an institution, especially if – as G advocates – we are to domesticate grieving and dying and integrate it into daily practice.

To this end G proposed sociologist Gargi Bhattacharyya’s collection of essays We, the Heartbroken (Hajar Press, 2023) as a baseline and diaristic study companion to the Van Abbemuseum collection team to help collectivize the research question of death in the museum. This question has expanded us and is living in the museum as one of four research threads on time that underpin the 2026 collection display That Time When We Were Not There.11.The title is a prompt in Another Roadmap Africa Cluster’s un/chrono/logical timeline tool.

The exhibition sets out to make the act of telling the time in a modern art museum multiplicitous: that is, to stretch and break it open and away from normative, linear ways of telling the time which usually plague Western art historical stories. G, drawing on Bhattacharyya, is challenging us to reset our understanding of grief and “dying”. As such, we have started to refine material “dying” in the collection as the process of phasing out of public life because of material death, entering a private domain or deaccession. In G’s words: ‘We, the Heartbroken goes through all the various motions of grieving – “dirtiness” aka the moment Bhattacharyya talks about not washing, to becoming this clown to sexual desire while grieving. It’s this all-rounded insight of honesty that I had never read before.’

In turn, G has offered the team the following meditation that lifts boundary between the living and the dead: If we approach artworks like living beings who eventually die and have an afterlife, what changes in how we care for them? How might a birthday party or funeral look for this item? And in Bhattacharyya’s terms: ‘What if we are already as one and have only to see it?’

Climate Forum III: Readings

Gargi Bhattacharyya, ‘Depression’, in We, the heartbroken, Hajar Press, 2023
Koleka Putuma, ‘Graduation’, in Collective Amnesia, Cape Town: Manyano Media, 2nd Ed. 2020