03.05-05.07.2026

Illicit Bookshop, Alain Guiraudie, Wade Guyton, Ceidra Moon Murphy, Anastasia Pavlou

Opening 2 May, 6-9pm.

Exact Date Unknown

Ceidra Moon Murphy

In her essay Remembrance, Annette Kuhn recalls a photograph on the back of which her mother had written: “Just back from Bournemouth (Convalescent) [sic]”. In Kuhn’s own handwriting, “Bournemouth” had been crossed out and replaced with “Broadstairs”, with the note “but I suspect the photo is earlier than this”.1

I return to this dispute often. I return to it now as I look at images of people I think I know but know nothing of; objects I might own but haven’t touched; shapes I can make out but cannot name; landscapes and interiors I think I have been in but it’s too dark to say for sure.

These plotless, inconclusive works confront us with an absence of stories, tempting us to create them where they do not exist. With tired eyes, I look at dead ends from which I can’t quite reverse. They are at once intimate and totally anonymous, giving everything and nothing of the artist. In their persistent landmarklessness, we find, as with Kuhn’s family photo, cues for conflicting associations. These conflicts give rise to narratives, the ultimate objects of suspicion. As we watch, we are lured into creating

the many missing contexts of these works, and together form a sort of collective biography—a catalogue of unsung scenarios: of walking; of waiting; of dimly lit rooms and streets; of looking in and looking out; of playfulness; of stillness—all with their exact dates unknown.

Psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, we make sense of reality by organising experience into narrative form, such that events become “cognizable” only when emplotted within a story.2 Narratives and their interpretation are not determined by the facts but shaped
by our expectations of narrative coherence, which itself stems from our socially constructed, often normative, beliefs about human behaviour. The impulse toward storytelling structures the way we encounter images, compelling us to impose meaning, as if transcribing them into words and compiling them into tales are the only ways of making them visible.

Might we do away with narrative this one time? If narrative is a primary means by which humans construct reality, the desire to resist storytelling underscores the radical openness of these images, which continually return the viewer to a state of interpretive beginning. Unlike a story, which becomes muddied through retelling, these works, in their enduring indeterminacy deny that possibility. Each time I revisit them, I am back at the start. And I am happy to stay there.