The Affirmation

About

This exhibition takes its lead from themes of personal history and memory raised by Christopher Priest's 1981 novel The Affirmation and, through the lens of a more antagonistic and critical form of interpretation, aims to point towards an overtly positive viewpoint on contemporary art practice over any traditional melancholy fixation.

If we look at the main character in Priest's book, Peter Sinclair, we see a man tormented by bereavement and failure. At the beginning of the story, Sinclair's life starts to crumble before him in his London flat, and after being offered a place to stay by an elderly couple in return for work on their new home, he embarks on an autobiography while temporarily residing in their small cottage in the English countryside. However, he soon finds himself writing the story of another man, 'affirming' a parallel identity in an imagined world, a persona whose sinister attraction draws him forever further in.

Similar to this, each of the twelve artists in this project have been encouraged to reconsider, reorder or scramble their own artistic identity, and consciously distort forms of art history in a way that goes beyond mere ironic appropriation, and extends out towards a new and unfamiliar view of the world.

As well as making new work for the exhibition, each artist has been invited to work with the Special Collection at Chelsea College of Art and Design Library. By considering the archive's contents and making small interventions, artists have been able to create new configurations of artefacts that might question or throw historical discourse into doubt. Each artist has been able to find their own connections within the library's archive, and fictionalise a personal narrative within its contents. In one sense, the context of affirmation and the chosen literary reference point, shows the paradox of asserting one's confidence in oneself and contemporary discourse, while simultaneously insisting or establishing a different position.