Museum of Disruptions
Part I: Archive of Thrown Objects
Museum of Disruptions is an ongoing project that examines acts of disruption in political and public space through the framework of an imagined museum institution. Combining photography, sculpture, and moving image, the project catalogues artefacts linked to moments of interruption, protest, failure, and public confrontation.
The first part of the project, Archive of Thrown Objects, assembles a collection of artefacts associated with historical and contemporary incidents in which politicians were targeted with ordinary objects. Developed through historical records, news reports, and online archives, the project traces a dispersed collection of objects linked to acts of political disruption and bring them together within the fictional structure of the museum.
The photographic archive isolates each object from the moment of impact and detached from the bodies they were directed toward, the object is reconstructed and presented as though it were a recovered museum artefact. Suspended between evidence, relic and reconstruction, these photographs question what happens when an impulsive political gesture is separated from the event and transformed through processes of documentation, classification and display.
The project expands beyond the thrown objects themselves to consider other forms of evidence that an institution might preserve. Berlusconi’s Two Broken Teeth and Bandage, cast in bronze and clay, shifts attention from the projectile to the bodily trace left by an act of public confrontation. The work reconstructs the aftermath as an artefact, transforming temporary injury and medical material into an apparently permanent museum object.
Museum of Disruptions: Physics Lesson takes the form of a staged educational broadcast presented on a CRT television. The work references school television lessons broadcast on Egyptian national television that I watched as a student, as well as a student film I participated in during my final year of engineering school in 2007. Beginning with a physics lesson on projectile motion, the script gradually allows the language of force, trajectory, velocity, distance and impact to acquire another meaning within the political context of the exhibition. After filming, I re-filmed the footage using the same VHS camera used to make the student film in 2007, bringing together personal memory, educational authority and the apparently objective language of scientific explanation.
A hand-coloured photographic work, Press Conference at the Prime Minister’s Palace, Iraq, 14 December 2008, extends the project from the object towards the site of disruption. The work revisits the widely broadcast moment when Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at US President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad. Rather than depicting the throw or its intended target, I turned towards the room in which the event occurred: its furnishings, decorations, painting and the theatrical arrangement of political power around the press conference.
Working from a still taken from the video recording, I digitally removed every person from the image and reconstructed the parts of the room obscured by their bodies. I then rephotographed the reconstructed image using a film camera, produced a negative, printed it as a silver gelatin photograph in the darkroom and hand-coloured the print with photographic oil paint. The process moves the image repeatedly between digital and analogue forms, complicating its relationship to the original recording. Emptied of its protagonists, the conference room becomes a stage on which the event is no longer visible but remains present through its absence; the image becomes an empty stage for a gesture that still echoes in political memory.
Across Archive of Thrown Objects, the imagined museum does not preserve history intact. Instead, it reconstructs fragments: the object that travelled through the air, the calculation of its trajectory, the bodily trace left by impact, and the architectural setting in which an act occurred. Through these acts of separation and reconstruction, Museum of Disruptions considers how political gestures change when they become evidence, images and artefacts, and how institutions might preserve the material traces of disruption while simultaneously distancing them from the urgency of the events that produced them.
Museum of Disruptions: Archive of Thrown Objects, archival pigment prints, custom blackwood frames, 510 X 93cm, edition 1/5 + 2AP, 2026.
Museum of Disruptions: Berlusconi’s Two Broken Teeth and Bandage, bronze and clay, edition 1/3 + 1AP, fabrication by: Brigit Ryan and Ezz Monem, bronze cast by Mal Wood Foundry, 2026.
Museum of Disruptions: Press Conference at the Prime Minister’s Palace, Iraq, 14 December 2008, hand-colored oil on silver gelatin print, custom Blackwood frame, 42.5 X 31 cm (framed), edition 1/3 + 1AP, 2026.
Museum of Disruptions: Physics Lesson, single-channel video, colour, sound, CRT monitor, 12 minutes, looped. Cast: Dan Hawkins, filming assistance: Brigit Ryan, 2026.
Installation view of Museum of Disruptions, Part I: Archive of Thrown Objects exhibition at Conners Conners gallery.