Museum of Angels
A manoeuvre through the British Museum: angels, archives, and the performance of belief.
In 2003, I was invited to be artist in residence at the British Museum to mark its 250th anniversary. Founded in 1753, the British Museum is often regarded as the world’s first public museum—its vast holdings segmented into ten departments which, institutionally, rarely communicate.
I proposed a manoeuvre that would conceptually and physically thread those departments together, drawing upon a shared symbolic figure: the angel. My initial suggestion was to address the Museum’s occult foundations—specifically, the presence of John Dee’s library as one of its three founding collections. Dee, the sixteenth-century alchemist, mathematician, and advisor to Elizabeth I, spent the final years of his life allegedly communicating with angels via a language he transcribed: Enochian.
The proposal—linking the Museum to magick—was declined. I returned with a second, subtler gesture: to locate every representation of a “winged intermediary being” across all departments, whether Christian, pre-Christian, demonic, Islamic, Buddhist, Babylonian, or mythic. I would construct a walkable route—a manoeuvre—through these presences.
This was met with approval. The Museum had no existing inventory of such beings, so I created one, designing and printing a guidebook that would form the textual core of the performance.
The result was Museum of Angels: a live, discursive performance structured as a guided walk through the museum’s public galleries. Over its duration, participants encountered objects, texts, and sculptural presences—each marking a site of angelic or daemonic figuration. The manoeuvre was not instructional but interpretive: a constellation of fragments, citations, and historical resonances that activated the Museum as a site of belief, cosmology, and cultural transmission.
As Steve Pile noted in his 2005 essay in Cultural Geographies, the work operated across multiple registers. It was an act of mapping, of critical guidance, and of participatory art-making. It invited audiences to step into the work—not simply as viewers, but as co-performers of a live, symbolic passage through time and myth.
The guidebook is now available here:
✶ Guidebook Edition
The Museum of Angels guidebook, published in 2003 by Gli Ori on behalf of the British Museum, serves as both an artefact and an instructional device—part liturgical object, part performance score. It maps the trajectory of the manoeuvre through the museum’s collections, offering fragmentary texts, references, and symbolic cues.
This pocket-sized edition includes over 30 black and white illustrations, a foreword by the artist, and an afterword by curator James Putnam. It guides readers through representations of angels and winged creatures across various cultures and epochs, from ancient Mesopotamia to the angelic communications of John Dee and Edward Kelley in the sixteenth century.
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