The Art Newspaper

Derek Ogbourne, The Human Optogram Device, 2008

An exhibition unlike any other has just opened in Sharjah. “The Museum of Optography: The Purple Chamber”, backed by the Sharjah Art Foundation, is currently at the Collections Building, Arts Area, opposite the Sharjah Museum of Art (until 3 October). The eyebrow-raising project comes courtesy of the artist Derek Ogbourne; according to his website, the show, part of a series, “explores the idea of 'The Last Image' bleached on to the retina at the moment of death”. Ogbourne's unusual pursuit was prompted by a fracas at a party in the1990s when the artist was punched in the eye, reports Gulf News. Emiratis can pop in and pore over photographs of rabbit optograms from 1975, 145 “imagined last moments” drawn by Ogbourne and a recreation of the laboratory of Wilhelm Kühne, a 19th-century German physiologist who apparently created the only known optogram. “My history and that of the Museum converge and overlap to create a world where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred, where birth and death merge and where objectivity is lost,” says Ogbourne, rather enigmatically.

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