Unknown Affinities might be considered the first wing of The Museum of Without – a museum of proxies and gaps, an unhinged museum held together by its hermeneutical framing practices alone. This enormous and ambitious project directly displays techniques of enclosure and addresses the museum's grasp of its artefacts, actively asking: what might a museum without artefacts be? What might a collection of losses hold, and what might hold it?

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The installation presents a sketch of such absences. It is a scattered monument of mounts – or armatures – each made to scale to grasp every known extinct bird species of Aotearoa New Zealand: holotype, fossil and full skeletal remains alike.

Through this apparatus, which underwrites containment and reveals the museum as a place that presupposes the absence of what it aims to hold, keep and "safeguard", we might imagine the potentiality of something being full of things at the same time as it is emptied.

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Unknown Affinities is made up of two distinct elements: one part of an ongoing investigation into things that contain – such as museums, encyclopaedias and lists – and that which cannot be contained – such as vapours, spirit, contagions and, in this instance, transmissions of archival recordings of the birdsong of now-extinct species across FM bandwidth; and eradications, in the form of scaffold mounts made to grasp that which is gone.

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Occupying the entire gallery floor, Unknown Affinities presents itself in a full state of absent-hood, reminding us that all things are in constant movement, that all things are migratory and transitory – leaving nothing left to grasp.

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Read Stephen Turner's text here.