nvisible Museum

While its name suggests it might be difficult to find, the nvisible Museum (the 'I' has evidently already vanished) is showing up all over the place. In the last several years, exhibitions of the nvisible's collection have appeared in art venues from Kiev to Toronto, Edinburgh to Birmingham, Alabama, and from the island of Madeira to San Francisco. Its latest show, 'Ghosts', opened on Halloween in Memphis, Tennessee, and will soon be followed by exhibitions in Cairo and Kyoto.

Founded in 1987 by an anonymous London collector with a shrewd eye for spotting emerging talent, the museum's permanent collection boasts seminal works by some 40 international artists, among them Rachel Whiteread, Matthew Barney, Steve McQueen, Gabriel Orozco and Cady Noland. Most of these works of art are eminently visible, although a few pieces in the Memphis show play with the idea of disappearance, including a nocturnal landscape by Paul Morrison that is cut into black rubber so that the image is impossible to see from certain angles.

But what makes this unique institution truly invisible is not its collection, but the fact that it lacks all the tangible characteristics of the average museum. Possessing neither a physical nor a bureaucratic structure, it functions with the admirable economy of a virus, coming to life only when it finds an appropriate host. The rest of the time, the nvisible's collection is dispersed in a network of friendly loans made to artists, curators and various acquaintances in London and New York, whose homes essentially function as the museum's displaced galleries.

http://www.eyestorm.com/feature/ED2n_article.asp?article_id=181&caller=1

Posted by delpesco at April 24, 2004 07:33 PM