From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Dakar Negative Inventory (Lost Curatorial Work, 1993)
This article documents a work that may never have been physically realized. The catalogue survives in four known copies; the collection itself is legendary.
A speculative curatorial project initiated in Dakar in 1993 by ██ , a curator whose other work remains untraced. The Negative Inventory was conceived as a museum exhibition and accompanying catalogue, but the central mystery is whether the collection—or even the exhibition space itself—was ever realized.
What survives is the catalogue: a 140-page hardcover volume published in 250 copies in 1993 by ██ Press, Dakar. The catalogue documents 87 artworks in meticulous detail: photographs, dimensions, materials, provenance, critical essays. Yet according to all available eyewitness testimony, these 87 works were never displayed, and some were never made. A 1993 review in ██ described visiting the exhibition space—a warehouse in the Medina district—and finding it entirely empty except for the catalogue stacks themselves. Another account claims the "exhibition" consisted only of the catalogue arranged on shelves, visitors reading descriptions of artworks that existed only in text.
Three of the four surviving catalogue copies contain different images in the same positions—same artwork title and description, different photographs. The fourth copy has marginal annotations in a hand identified, provisionally, as the curator's: "Never existed"; "Made after catalogue"; "Photo of photo of lost photo." [1]
References within the catalogue to Beach Surgery adaptations are oblique: Artwork 34 is titled "Two figures in a room, one blind, discussing the nature of cycles" with a photograph of an empty gallery. Artwork 67, "Surgery in the Dust Garden (After Smith)," is described as "dimensions variable; status unknown; possibly destroyed in ██ , 1997."
No photograph of the exhibition opening survives. The warehouse address no longer exists. The Press is defunct. The curator's subsequent whereabouts are unknown. A 2001 essay by ██ claims the entire project was a hoax or a performance piece; others argue it was a real exhibition whose artworks were never returned to makers and were subsequently lost. The catalogue remains: evidence of works that may never have existed, or that existed once and left no trace except these descriptions.
See also
References
- ↑ Catalogue copy, David Coplan Collection, University of the Witwatersrand, 2019.