Outside Narration

Outside Narration is a curatorial project in which Keith Piper was invited by Sheffield Museums to select work from their historic collections to be displayed alongside, and in conversation with, his work ‘The Seven Rages of Man’ (Originally made in 1984/ Reconfigured in 2018).
‘The Seven Rages of Man’ is a large-scale narrative driven work in which seven historical epochs are viewed through the personal experiences of a single black subject. These seven epochs are selected from a timeline starting in pre-colonial Africa, stretching through the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Plantations of the New World, migration to the UK in the 1950s, growing militancy and political awareness, ending in a final ‘return’ to a reconfigured Africa. This represents a historical timeline that sits outside of the official narration of history, a narration which more often informs the collections of objects found in Museum storerooms.
Objects were therefore researched and selected from the official Sheffield Museums collection that provided an official ‘counter narrative’ of each historical epoch within the ‘Seven Rages’, bringing these at times contested, at times complimentary accounts of history into dialogue.