Ceidra Moon Murphy
Paris Internationale
16–20 October 2024
Preview: Tuesday 15 October, 11 am–8 pm
For Paris Internationale 2024, a. SQUIRE shows a new body of work by Ceidra Moon Murphy which continues to interrogate state-contracted technologies, tactics and biases, informational slippages and disclosures, and the notion of a public interest. The presentation consists of 8 wall-mounted vitrines, each one containing a comprehensive series of Freedom of Information (FOI) request refusal letters sent by UK state bodies to members of the public, which in turn were obtained by Murphy by way of her own FOI requests. The work began in early February with Murphy’s submission of one such request to the Ministry of Defence. It reads:
I would like to request the following information:
A complete list of all FOI requests addressed to the Ministry of Defence that were rejected/withheld in full between October 1st 2023 and 31st January 2024. I understand these requests must be anonymised.
In the ensuing months, Murphy entered into a stunted and pedantic dialogue with His Majesty’s Treasury, the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police, and the Ministry of Justice, among other authorities. Every refusal benchmarked her language and whittled her determination to access the desired information. These works compile and sort her findings.
The requests cited in each letter enclosed within the vitrines encompass an extensive range of topics, from statistics on bariatric surgery deaths and nuclear weapons holdings to the UK-Rwanda asylum plan. The exemption invoked with each refusal is similarly varied. The correspondence is organised according to the numerical value of the exemption applied (for instance, Section 34 Parliamentary privilege). In every resulting stack, papers are further sorted alphabetically by department, and then by date. The FOI requests become both a subject, a material and a method for Murphy, who uses them not only to point out the bureaucracies of the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, but also to uncover information withheld in other channels of official communication. Silhouetted behind each work is the Public Interest Test (PIT). As the UK Information Commissioner’s Office stipulates, ‘The public interest here means the public good.’
Mounted opposite the FOI responses is a microphone box acquired from the House of Commons, the democratically elected house of the UK Parliament. The box lies open, its contents absent.
The presentation is accompanied by a conversation between the artist and Olivia Aherne, Curator, Chisenhale Gallery.
Ceidra Moon Murphy lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include 118½, Emalin, London (2024); Buffer, a. SQUIRE, London (2023); and Earwitness, Southbank Centre, London (2022). Her work is held in the collection of KADIST, and is the subject of a forthcoming institutional solo exhibition at E-WERK Freiburg, Germany (2025).
