How do we re-think the way objects of art are looked at and understood? Unsettled Objects brings together the work of over 30 artists from across the globe whose art helps us consider this question while provoking a re-imagining of the ways in which history is narrated and explored. 
 
Drawn from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, this exhibition presents recent and rarely seen acquisitions from the Foundation’s holdings.  The show derives its title from Lothar Baumgarten’s featured artwork, Unsettled Objects (1968–1969), a slide-carousel projection filmed in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Here, Baumgarten interrogates the method that museums adopt to categorize, store and present artefacts. We are asked to consider: where do these objects come from? Are the keepers of these entities entitled to hold them, and if so, under what jurisdiction?
 
The artists featured in Unsettled Objects work in a variety of mediums across a broad expanse of time. They explore concepts of mapping and archaeology, of memory and selfhood, of sight and absence. As the title suggests, their art unsettles our understanding of history by proposing that art has the potential to encourage a contoured view of a collective and inclusive society.

Participating artists: Lothar Baumgarten and William Kentridge