John Latham: Forget Everything You Ever Knew (2020)

John Latham: Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew, an online exhibition that starts from an untitled, undated poem written by John Latham. This exhibition is a collaboration between MA Curating and Collections 2019-2020 (Chelsea College of Arts, UAL) and Flat Time House (a London landmark that was declared a Living Sculpture in 2003). The show stems from extensive research of John Latham’s archival material supervised by Flat Time House Director and Curator Gareth Bell-Jones.

Latham’s elusive text speaks to a process of unlearning, through an exploration of language that attempts to interrogate received knowledge. In correspondence with such ideas, Ifeanyi Awachie, Anna Barham and Noa Latham have been invited to respond to John Latham’s writing through the lens of poetics, time and politics.

The exhibition, John Latham: Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew presents the poem’s archival document in an interactive pdf format. Through distinct hyperlinked words and punctuation (‘became’, ‘-’, ‘different’) across the text, viewers will be directed to contributions by the invited participants.

Through this methodology the exhibition considers the ways in which language contributes to the dismantling of certain received knowledge, and how the politics of forgetting might be instructive for antiracist discourse and wide-spread practices of decolonisation; to consolidate and recontextualise our histories; to embrace our intuition as Incidental Persons. Coined by Latham, the ‘Incidental Person’ is able to critically reflect from a distance and respond to social and political situations through their intuition. The curatorial approach is based on a careful consideration of the artist’s ideas and works throughout his years. John Latham: Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew marks the second time John Latham, a pioneer of British conceptual art, is the focus of an exhibition at Chelsea Space.

Curated by:
Asya Gurevich, Bilal Akkouche, Carolina Fontes, Celina Loh, Cara Salmon, Conor Smyth, Elisavet Logotheti, Han Yan, Jiaying Gao, Hao Long, Junyu Lu, Jiachuan Wang, Jiashu Zou, Lei Gu, Ni Gu, Ola Talib, Pei-Yu Wu, Qianjing Yuan, Ruiying Wang, Sara-Ann Barber, Shin-Hung Liu, Samuel Marshall, Shu Zhang, Weirui Liu, Yannis Lo, Yige Hu, Zehui Gao, Zhe Wu