This publication is produced in occasion of the Pakistani artist Huma Mulji's winning the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013. An exhibition, with works by other finalists, took place at Art Dubai 2013, with Murtaza Vali being the curator.
'The Miraculous Lives of This and That - a twenty-first century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities - employs the whimsical and wondrous logic of acquisition, categorisation, organisation and display of these unruly antecedents of the modern museum. A variety of ordinary and extraordinary objects, gathered from Huma Mulji's local milieu, fill the compartments and drawers of a slightly larger than life wooden cabinet. Among them are taxidermy animals, porcelain imitations of cheap plastic dolls, copper votive objects in the shape of body parts, and arrays of rotting teeth, all metonyms of a body haunted by decay and inevitable death. Straddling the threshold between the animate and the inanimate, between use and obsolescence, these objects challenge clear-cut distinctions between material states of being. Finally, the cabinet is an existential meditation on the mortality of all things, both living and not, and on the very matter of life.' - from back cover.
Includes biographies of the artist and contributors.
extra|ordinary | The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013
Onsite
English
mixed media,  archive,  museum studies,  solo exhibition
2013
120
9789948444770
1
artist monograph, 
catalogue
Introduction - Murtaza VALI
A Collecting of the World: Huma Mulji's Cabinet of Curiosities - Adnan MADANI
Inventory of Things
The Matter of Loss: Huma Mulji in Conversation with Murtaza Vali
Huma Mulji - The Miraculous Lives of This and That

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