Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Until March 2025, visitors to the Fitzwilliam Museum pass under the soft white veil of light from Glenn Ligon’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’.
The neon artwork hugs the stone columns of the Museum’s historic portico. An offering of the art within to the public realm of Cambridge, it alludes to the artist’s careful museum wide curation and exhibition - ‘Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place’.
Working with the Fitzwilliam Museum, +apt developed the details; Planning and listed building consent packages and Contract administration for the installation of Glenn Ligon’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’.
Silicon bands; Stainless steel straps and support frames ensure the temporary art clings to the columns without fixing points nor permanent impact.
Client: University of Cambridge
Structural Engineer: The Morton Partnership
Art Installation: setWorks
“The museum’s frontage glows with white neon text: nine different English translations of the last two lines of Greek poet Constantine P Cavafy’s 1898 Waiting for the Barbarians…
The different formulations of Cavafy’s Greek text flex with yearning and complaint, all referring to the history of Cavafy’s home town of Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, from its founding as a centre of Hellenistic culture, to its subsequent status as a place of cultural, scientific and scholarly learning under French and then British colonial rule. On the flat East Anglian fens, Cambridge is not Alexandria but it often dreams of the past.”
