Mark Dion

Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism And Its Legacy

"Recalling the short-lived Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes of 1924–1925—part information centre and ‘public relations’ office, and part surrealist archive—Mark Dion trawled the Manchester Museum’s own collections and found the raw material for this book and an installation in the museum. Renowned for his work exploring taxonomy, archaeology and ecology, in Bureau Mark Dion documents his opportunistic encounters with the Museum of Manchester’s neglected drawers and overlooked recesses that are home to redundant labels, orphaned mounts, defunct teaching models, botanical freaks, Egyptian fakes and the minutiae that have fallen through the cracks of museum practice and lain abandoned. Dion’s Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy is both a repository for the detritus of museum life and a working process, classifying the museum’s un-classifiable whilst exploring the bureaucratic workings of the institution."

Mark Dion’s Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, which opened at the Manchester Museum in May 2005 is now on permanent display at the Museum!