The Museum of Found Objects: Reniel Del Rosario

The Museum of Found Objects (MOFO) is coming to Britain for the first time. In honour of its inaugural installation in London, the Museum will be including some British-found objects alongside its permanent collection. The Museum Director, ‘Ron de Solace’, will be on hand to give personal tours of the Museum, and visitors will also be able to visit the museum’s pop-up gift shop, selling mugs, T-shirts, pencils and other memorabilia. 

The Museum of Found Objects is a satirical immersive experience created by the US-based American-Filipino artist Reniel del Rosario. Del Rosario aims to highlight the way the art world, motivated entirely by profit and markets, appraises artworks by their cultural, historical and monetary value, sometimes making errors.

Working from shots of artworks from online collections and catalogues, del Rosario has created hundreds of ceramic renditions of them, particularly those that have been miscatalogued, misattributed or historically misaligned. To these he applies labels, mimicking what he calls the frequent ‘mishandlings, malaprops and mistakes’ made by art institutions. By poking fun at these mistakes, he questions and explores how art fits into a market-focused world and how it is valued. The highly entertaining Museum comprises performance and conceptual art, ceramics and text creation. For example, an ancient earthenware two-handled amphora has been recreated, glazed and emblazoned with a gaudy advertising slogan.

In a piece of unmissable performance art, Del Rosario will also play the sleazy, cigar-chomping, ill-suited Museum Director ‘Ron de Solace’. 

The MOFO project began in 2022 during a residency in Sonoma County, California. MOFO has been exhibited by Catherine Clark Gallery at the San Francisco Art Fair and it has since been developed in specific relation to objects linked to British cultural institutions.