203 / H The Collector

Minnie Black, Yves Cao, Soleil Corazón-Libre, Spencer Everett, Christian Amaya Garcia, Oorja Garg, Joseph Issac Cohen, Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers, Mary-Elisabeth Moore, Pegah Pasalar, Sarah Passino, Ridwana Rahman, Rujuta Rao, Lauren Rooney, Miranda Samuels, Mariia Usova, Trevor Warren

203 / H The Collector is a group exhibition organized by Oorja Garg and Ridwana Rahman after a year of collectively reading Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project with the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. The exhibition emerges from questions of collecting, commodities, memory, and the strange afterlives of objects.

Written between 1927 and 1940, The Arcades Project remained unfinished at Benjamin's death and was published posthumously, assembled from fragments, citations, observations, and reflections. Less a completed book than an unfinished archive, it unsettles linear forms of reading and history. Benjamin returns often to the figure of the collector: one who withdraws objects from circulation and reorders them according to intimate systems of meaning. In this gesture, things loosen from economic function and enter narrative life. The exhibition gathers around these conditions, bringing together objects collected, recollected, hoarded, journaled, found, and displaced, suspended between memory, ruin, and possibility.