Bring It Up from the Dark

Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley are longtime collaborators. Their work together often contemplates the lyric possibilities of the museum, proposing a gentle counterbalance to the ways these dominant institutions have sought to order and narrativize the world. Farooq and Stanley are particularly interested in the time that museum objects spend in storage, rather than on display, and speculate on the possible relationships that might form between such belongings—which are often collected from very different eras and contexts—as they sit adjacent to one another on the quiet, darkened shelves of the museum vault, catalogued and carefully wrapped. 

Bring It Up from the Dark developed out of the artists’ research in and with the collections and archived materials of the SFU Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The work imagines the museum not as a storehouse, endlessly accumulating belongings, but as a woven archive—a tapestry of dissimilar things brought together through touch. At once a sculpture and a poem, the composition of Bring It Up from the Dark is inspired by the traditional Malayan poetic form of the pantoum, which interweaves repeated lines to create a kind of woven language, moving both forward and back in recurring echoes. The lines of this poem are conveyed both as the archival materials of the museum itself—bubble wrap, acetate, plastic wrap and twine—and as written words themselves, drawn from the field journals of past archaeology students at SFU, with their curious mixture of technical recordings, emotional journalling, and weather notation.