Geoffrey Farmer: Phantom Scripts

Phantom Scripts revisits three works by Geoffrey Farmer from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection — Vampire Archive, November 22, 1974 (2010 – 2025), The Politics of Appearing (2012 – 2025), The Good Sweeper (2017 – 2025)— reframing them through newly composed scripts, annotations, and didactic texts authored by the artist. The texts function as interjections — speculative, contextual, poetic — that reexamine and complicate the earlier works. In doing so, Farmer explores how art can be returned to, re-read, and re-situated under shifting historical and ethical awarenesses.

This exhibition is a return — not only to Farmer’s past works, and to the evolving conditions in which they are understood. Phantom Scripts highlights the artist’s curiosity to revisit the assumptions, forms, and the silences embedded in his earlier productions, treating the past not as fixed, but as an unsettled field of interpretation and implication. Early aesthetic elements remain — vivid, disorienting, alive — but are now considered by the artist within a broader awareness of colonial entanglements and queer disidentification, foregrounding the role of the museum not as neutral host, but as a site of complicity, memory, and potential transformation.