Curated by Nav Haq
How do you fit several dozen museums into one medium-size art institution? It helps if they’re all at least semifictional and manageably scaled, as in this forty- artist survey of museological mimicries. The reflexive finale of the Arnolfini’s year of fiftieth birthday celebrations, the show collates the continuum from Marcel Duchamp’s 1943 monographic trove in a suitcase, the Bôite-en-valise, to Marcel Broodthaers’s grand upending of taxonomic categories, to quixotic present-day examples such as Bill Burns’s Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals. (Plus, expect turns by Stuart Brisley, Tom Marioni, and Tomas Saraceno, among others.) “Museum Show,” then, ought to diversely illuminate why artists set up their own museums manqués—beyond the obvious appeal of ruling the roost without worrying about budgets, funding, acquisitions, etc. Most likely, it’ll also make one wonder how such a lulu of a curatorial concept went unclaimed for so long.
