Christodoulos Panayiotou
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Prologue: Quoting Absence
2006, Four channel audio installation, commissioned and produced by the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, U.K.

Prologue: Quoting Absence is the first part of a series of three works imitating the classical form of an academic dissertation on the topic of “absence”. The other two works have yet to be completed. Four scholars at Oxford University (each of them representing a different academic discipline: Philology, Theology, Astrophysics and Arts) were commissioned to conduct research on the subject of absence and on July 4, 2006 they took part in a “huis-clos” conversation at a recording studio. The outcome of this conversation, a four channel audio installation, is placed in the empty gallery of the museum. A book transcribing the content of the conversation has been published.



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Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Installation view

Extracts from the publication Prologue: Quoting Absence

(…) CH: So the black hole as the essence of absence.

PF: The point where you put something so dense that it warps space so much. And then it’s slightly complicated because it also stretches space. So you could say that it actually makes more space than there was before. But it also makes this hole; there is this hole in the middle where you’ve basically taken away space, you’ve created an absence at a point.

CH: The thing about absence for me though is the fact that it’s always a space which is rushing to be filled. So even if we think in material terms, the black hole we can intellectually talk about it as an absence, and yet here we are rushing to fill the space in dialogue by attempting to say what the black hole is. And people spend their lives attempting to study them, Hawkins and all the rest of it, and this links back to something Pedro mentioned before about Eastern spiritualities, meditation. But there are serious political points here as well, the way in which the West with its metaphysics of presence has really attempted to look at the East as being an absent space which can be colonised and written upon and ordered and shaped. But I think there is this sense in which absence just invites people to try and fill it up. It’s very difficult, as you said before in your meditation example, to think of a void and not try and fill it in. (...)

A transcript of the recorded conversation is published by the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (Cornerhouse, Amazon)