Keith Piper | Relocating the Remains

Solo show at Royal College of Art, Gulbenkian Galleries. 1997
Date: 18 July, 1997 until 13 August, 1997
Curator: Gilane Tawadros/David Chandler inIVA
Organiser: inIVA/Royal College of Art

Major exhibition by Keith Piper. Relocating the Remains was a mid-career retrospective organised by inIVA and held at the Royal College of Art Gulbenkian Galleries, London, in 1997. The accompanying catalogue featured a major foreword written by Gilane Tawadros, then Director of inIVA, and David Chandler, then Project Manager of inIVA. The main body of the catalogue text was written by Kobena Mercer, divided into several chapters. Witness at the Crossroads: An Artist’s Journey in Post-colonial Space; Art’s Histories and Culture’s Geographies: 1979 - 1985; Twilight of the Dread Heteropolis: 1986 - 1990; Anatomies of the Body Politic, Its Central Nervous System: 1991 - 1996; Coda: Tomorrow Never Knows. The catalogue, which runs to some 96 pages, is extensively illustrated, not only with examples of Piper’s work, but also of a number of works by other artists, as a way of locating Piper’s work in a variety of contexts and illustrative of a number of the artist’s influences.

The exhibition itself was a well-resourced affair. It was, as mentioned, a mid-career retrospective which featured Piper’s work over a period of the best part of two decades, recast and re-presented largely through the prism of new media. The catalogue featured an extensive Biography and a Selected Bibliography. A CD-ROM made by the artist was included with the catalogue. The exhibition secured a significant amount of press coverage, including a rather damning review in the Guardian newspaper, by Rachel Withers.

»  Relocating the Remains

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 1997