In British Museum Room 18 Air Sample (2025) the artist captures the atmospheric essence of Room 18 at the British Museum — where the Parthenon Sculputres are currently held — a sealed collection of scents, microscopic matter, and airborne particles. This hermetically preserved sample contains the invisible traces of human presence, bacterial life, and museum artifacts that occupied the space at a precise moment. By enclosing this air in a sealed vessel, the work creates a temporal capsule that preserves a specific instant. The container, with its reflective exterior, now houses the sensory memory of bodies and objects, transported across space and time to engage with viewers in a new context. The piece raises questions about cultural appropriation by focusing on perhaps its most abstract form—the taking of air itself. However, unlike traditional forms of cultural displacement, the air's removal creates no void in its original location, as it naturally replenishes. The presence of Room 18's atmosphere held and contained doesn't diminish the air in London.
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Visual artwork
Place
Melbourne, AustraliaVenue
Haydens, Brunswick East, Melbourne/NaarmNTRO Publisher
Hayden Stuart, Director, HaydensMedium
Stainless steel, mild steel, air, giclée printResearch Statement
British Museum Room 18 Air Sample (2025) might be situated within the history of institutional critique in contemporary art practices, focusing on how atmospheric appropriation challenges traditional notions of cultural preservation. British Museum Room 18 Air Sample (2025) exposes the unexamined sensory dimensions of museum spaces while questioning the boundaries of what can be collected, preserved, and displaced.
British Museum Room 18 Air Sample (2025) pioneers the concept of "atmospheric appropriation" as a methodology within institutional critique, expanding material practice beyond visible artifacts to include invisible environmental traces. By materialising the immaterial, the work reveals how institutional spaces function as living archives of microscopic cultural interactions and produce atmospheres in tangible ways. This approach generates new frameworks for understanding museums as dynamic ecosystems rather than static repositories. The hermetic vessel's paradoxical emptiness/fullness creates an affective encounter that fundamentally shifts audience perception of museum spaces, rendering visible the otherwise imperceptible dimensions of cultural preservation and displacement.
British Museum Room 18 Air Sample’s methodological approach connects it to broader contemporary art discourses around institutional critique, materiality, and the politics of museum spaces that have been significant in recent decades within contemporary art scholarship and curatorial practice. Since this work is recent (2025) its full critical reception and significance are still emerging.Size or Duration of Work
23.5 x 23.5 x 34 cm (canister)
84.1 x 118.9 cm (print)
