Allan Sekula

The Dockers’ Museum is a collection of minor artefacts that create an understanding of how the fundamental position of seafarers and port workers can be thought. They live between land and sea, one location and the whole world. This is also a prime example of Sekula’s ‘thinking-together’; objects, images and documents – and his critical ‘thinking together’ with viewers. M HKA owns the objects, Allan Sekula the thinking. These collected «objects of interest» are not to be understood as artworks, but they contextualize Sekula’s photography, while these in turn contextualize Sekula’s ongoing activity of collecting these items. Sekula finds his «objects of interest» at online auction houses, contrasting the mystical «speed of light» of the Internet with the slow movement of cargo, of which 90 per cent is moved by sea.

'In a certain way the key factor of the museum is the sarceness, or its limits, that's the critical element, it is lapidary quality and the specificity of that lapidarity' - Allan Sekula, 2011