I Cling to Virtue (2010)
I Cling to Virtue is a commission from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and presents a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and videos that reveal the intricate trajectories of the Lövy Singh clan, a fictional East London family of mixed descent. The project takes the grand historical, literary and cinematic traditions of the family saga simultaneously as its starting point and point of departure. The artists have produced the family by mixing their own geneologies with those of affluent 20th century families both real and fictional, such as the Kennedys, the Magnificent Ambersons, the Rothschilds, and Faulkner’s Snope Family. The curatorial voice of the installation is the flawed, biased memory of Monarch Lövy Singh, who proposes not a single, progressive, coherent story of his family, nor of the century through which his family lived, but rather one that is multiple and fragmentary. What results is a complex narrative revealed through distilled short stories and ghostly objects.
In collaboration with Noam Toran and Keith R. Jones.
A publication designed by Åbäke accompanies the project.