Inventory is a collective enterprise set up by a group of writers, artists and theorists, looking to explore the alternatives to the limitations imposed on these disciplines and for an interdisciplinary space from which to work. Inventory operates on a number of fronts ranging from a regularly published journal to organised events, lectures, interventionist strategies and exhibitions. Following on from Inventory’s previous exhibition at The Approach in 1999 Requiem For The Empty Quarter continues to explore a restless psychological as well as physical space within the city.

Found objects are modified, altered, written upon and carved into. A perforated steel shutter used to board up the windows of derelict houses becomes the canvas for an image of absurdist defiance. A park bench has been scrawled with alcohol related graffiti written by drunk sitters. Another object that has become a surface for Inventory’s rhetoric is an old office blind that lists a set of demands. In the work Requiem For The Empty Quarter old computer keyboards have been taken apart and the keys replaced, creating unique sentences and phrases. By disrupting the hegemony of a long established typing system they challenge the notion that the best methods always rise to the surface. A specially constructed desk made out of bolted together second hand shelves and furniture becomes a work station for reading the Inventory journal and for three CCTV monitors, playing back images of Inventory’s latest interruption to street life, where a busy Christmas shopping day on Oxford Street is disrupted by a pre-organised rugby scrum. Also contained in the Modular Propaganda Unit are radios picking up transmitted past Inventory recordings.

‘The empty quarter is a solemn terrain, although not outside a grey humour, a burst of laughter that rattles the soul. The inhabitants of the empty quarter can be found all over the world, individually and in small cells, carrying out small acts, constructing situations from an admixture of word, sound and image that must directly confront our condition. They are neither madmen nor prophets, philosophers or artists, only energised subjectivities that proclaim loudly and infinitely - LIFE IS NOT ENOUGH!’