(Above) Carolyn Drake has charted changing times in the former Soviet countries of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in Photographs of Central Asia
Exhibition: Objects in Performance, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, until October 4 and Carolyn Drake: Photographs of Central Asia, until November 15 2009
Tucked away from the recently re-opened Pitt Rivers Museum's labyrinthine display cases, a new surprise lurks for visitors this summer. The addition of two engaging new exhibitions shed fresh light on one of the world's greatest and most eclectic anthropological collections.
Carolyn Drake's photographs of central Asia and Gerard Mermoz's Objects in Performance encourage reflection on the ravages of cultural formation and change, as well as the traditional ways that ethnographic collections are organised.
American documentary maker Drake has spent two years capturing the social and economic flux of life in the former Soviet countries of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
With its bright lighting, the ambience of the Long Gallery is the antithesis of the musty gloom of the Pitt River's main collection. Drake's mission, however, remains the same as the forefathers of anthropology, whose oft-sinister discoveries dominate the adjacent room.
Her digital photography captures the intricacies of a unique cultural epoch with panache. Simple images juxtapose flashes of colour with merciless bleakness, capturing the poorest of the post-Soviet central Asian countries.
Struggling to cope with a crumbling infrastructure since the devastation wrought by Tajikistan's 1991 civil war, these photographs seamlessly expose the mundane routines of survival and tradition.
The sitters are damaged, but not broken – a man sits at a cafe table, his face creased into numbness. He seems oblivious to the animated faces of his children eating ice cream, their bright pink clothes opposing his sombre attire which blends into the shadows.
The displays are among the first at the new-look Pitt Rivers Museum, which reopened in May 2009 after a £1.5 million refurbishment programme
Drake suggests that the cultural clashes which have caused the region's malaise are still occurring. A newlywed woman looks into a mirror in traditional costume, solemn ancient rituals freezing her features, while the detritus of a western capitalist regime – branded bottles of shampoo, hair sprays and soaps – lie in front of her.
Elsewhere, an elderly woman speaks on a mobile phone in Kokand, a city built at the juncture of ancient trade routes. Standing in a stark, decaying room, she looks perplexed and slightly haunted. The results of the technology of other cultures being introduced, and the destruction they might yield, is a moot point.
If these images conjure the aftermath of inter-cultural conflict, Gerard Mermoz's theatrically-charged installation in the lower gallery uses provocative humour and ambiguity to capture the actual moment of cultural contact.
Gerard Mermoz reinterprets the cabinet of curiosities through eerie figurines
Figurines stand alongside each other like actors in a silent movie. Mermoz is asking us to ponder the expressions on their faces, the spaces between them and the tensions arising through these clashes of civilisations.
In The Explorer, a wetsuit-clad figure in a speed boat approaches a towering black female statue. The affect is comically salacious, but their indecipherable features and eerie immobility are unsettling.
Good Day Mr Darwin stages an encounter between the infamous anthropologist and a primeval ape. The pair lock eyes amid a sea of other figurines from Africa, China, India and Europe, as if they have randomly landed there, disorientated and adrift.
The display is reinterpreting the cabinets of curiosities we see elsewhere in the museum in a distinctly contemporary way, inviting us to challenge our pre-conceptions about savage, exotic or primitive cultures.
The overriding suggestion questions Western stereotypes. A carefully placed china figurine of a Victorian fop delicately fanning himself in the shade of a gigantic wooden African carving conveys the arrogance of the colonial enterprise, prompting us to revisit history via a narrative angle that conventional museum displays tend to lack.
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