A Time to Live, A Time to Die

Goshka Macuga's practice explores traditions of archiving, museum display and public spectacle in ways that disorientate and delight. In previous exhibitions she has provided a total unifying environment for the exhibition of other artist's work, collections of books or curiousities.
Taking her sourced images from publications, and reactivating them in tooled leather, Goshka Macuga's A Time To Live, A Time To Die replicates the authoritative material of book covers. Creating a double entendre 'cover version', Macuga's drawing is a composite of other artists' work, establishing a new context for image interpretation via juxtaposition of chance selection: the girl taken from Picasso, the book from Max Ernst, and birds from images from the 1905 Russian Revolution. Appropriating and reordering these disparate elements, Macuga constructs her own suggestive narrative based on an eclectic and disjointed history. Indelibly engraved on skin, A Time To Live, A Time To Die literally frames the ingrained fabric of memory as tractile experience.