Claire Beynon, Nigel Bunn, David Clegg, Scott Flanagan, Darren Glass, Jeff Henderson, Angela Lyon, Alex Mackinnon, Victoria McIntosh, Michael Morley, Ben Pearce, James Robinson, Fiona Shaw, and Peter Wegner.

A Museum of Obsessions is an homage to Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933 – 2005) who is credited with establishing the kind of speculative practice and thought that drives contemporary curatorial practice today. A Museum of Obsessions is also a curatorial, artistic and cultural exploration. It explores and speculates on the freedom of the intellectual and behavioural space opened by obsession. By collecting artworks it speculates on obsession as a form of sensual liberation, creative expression, and socio-cultural resistance, and a force for a self-determined kind of ordered disorder. It speculates on obsession as what Szeemann identified as a primal and positive ‘unit of energy’ that is the source of creative individuality and the catalyst of ‘intensive intentions’ and ‘intensity in art.’ It also recognises the absurdity and instability of the ‘world’ of obsession.
Ultimately, I wish to privilege and dynamise the obsessional objects and obsessive practice of creative individuals. I also wish to tentatively search for and play up connections between what might be seen and thought of as ‘the will towards freedoms of different kinds.’ At the same time, I wish to play up the enchantment, elusiveness, fragility and pleasurable absurdity of a ‘museumisation’ of obsessions and the kind of off-kilter balance provided by an obsessive practice or behaviour.
A Museum of Obsessions will draw on the white cube aspirations and coincident alternative nature of the Blue Oyster Gallery. It will present the rationality and specialisation of the art and natural history museum while it honours the more intriguing realm of the chambers of art and marvels and curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which Walter Grasskamp identifies as the first climax and most free form of a history of collecting. It will also seek to rehabilitate collecting as an arbitrary activity capable of creating self-evident connections and a self-determined form of resistance to established social profiles and post-enlightenment patterns of categorisation.
Jodie Dalgleish, New Zealand.