Prior to the opening of the exhibition, Ogbourne gave a talk at Traffic Gallery in Dubai which served as a preface to the show, contextualising it within the artist’s larger body of work. Ogbourne guided the audience through his early experimentations with a variety of artistic mediums, as well as the birth and evolution of his interest in the various themes that inspired the Museum of Optography.

As a young adult, Ogbourne developed an interest in painting. During this time he also cultivated an attraction to some of the existential questions and concerns that continue to inform his work today. Pointing to a Polaroid of his 16-year old self standing next to an early work influenced by the style of famed Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, Ogbourne recalled the man who inspired the blurry shadow of a figure at the centre of the painting – a family friend who, nearing the end, resigned himself to his couch where he would sit for hours awaiting death. This was, Ogbourne explained, the first time he palpably experienced death; it was his first memorable encounter with the anxiety that a sudden awareness of human mortality can evoke.

During his undergraduate studies at the Slade, Ogbourne tended towards abstraction and surrealism in his paintings, but he was simultaneously engrossed by a desire to create physical, human works, and an attempt to locate a figurative language that would best help him project his mind onto the canvas. His post-graduate years saw him shift away from painting and what he calls ‘flat’ or contained art, towards experimental installations and sculptures. He wanted to create spaces that he and his audiences could walk into, to find a way to crawl beneath the skin of an art work by constructing environments which would immerse the participant’s body, mind and sensory faculties in conditions set up by the artist.

During this time, Ogbourne focused on creating interactive sculptures and installations like a walk-in, upholstered fridge, a circular sofa with no entry point, and drawing-pins arranged in a line or pile in the middle of the street. His artistic practice became more about setting up conditions that relied on a participant to complete their transformation into an artwork. As an artist, he allowed himself to develop a certain kind of vulnerability, coming to depend on participants to co-create his artworks out of the particular experiences provoked by their interactions with the stimuli he arranged. Around this time, Ogbourne also joined the artist collective BANK and began to engage in performative art. In one experimental performance piece, he transmitted his heartbeat to a series of scattered radios arranged in the shape of a giant dumbbell. In another, he attached a camera to his head and hid out of the audience’s sight in a gallery space. Everything he saw was projected onto a screen for visitors to witness. He invited the audience to occupy the space of a third eye on his body and to see the world through his ‘lenses.’

What Ogbourne’s otherwise seemingly unrelated past installations and experiments have in common is the aim to confront their audiences with barriers, and to communicate the difficulty involved in trying to project what is inside, within the individual, to the outside world – the insurmountable challenge of capturing a person’s reality and sharing with others how he or she perceives it. In these early projects one can glimpse, in foetal form, some of the themes, concerns and anxieties that would later fully possess Ogbourne and thrust the Museum of Optography into existence.

On opening night the Museum, housed in the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Collections Building, became a natural extension of the lively and interactive neighbourhood surrounding it. Curious shoppers wandered through its doors after visits to tailors or spice shops, inspecting the strange objects Ogbourne has arranged throughout the space, scanning his paintings and photographs, stepping into the Optographic Chamber he constructed himself, and then returning to their errands, perhaps with a few new and unexpected thoughts and feelings inspired by this temporary addition to the street.

The Museum of Optography does not have one beginning. There is no single, easily identifiable light bulb moment when this constantly evolving amalgam of objects, paintings, videos and texts suddenly transpired. Rather, the Museum grew organically out of a series of superficially unrelated experiences in Ogbourne’s life that somehow managed to link together, gluing themselves to the hamster wheel of spinning thoughts constantly rotating inside his head and facilitating the gradual birth of the mysterious mind circus that is the Museum of Optography. A Time-Life book from 1970 describing Jesuit friar Christopher Scheiner’s alleged 17th century discovery of an image tattooed onto the retina of a frog awoke from dormant memory a traumatic scene from the early 1990s when Ogbourne was hit in the eye one night on a London street. That smack to the eye triggered a strong sense of mortality, a fear of a sudden end and a fascination with the eye as the medium through which it might be possible to preserve the final moment. A few years later that unsettling feeling was reinvigorated when Ogbourne serendipitously came across that passage in the Time-Life book. The research that followed these events led Ogbourne to the unfinished work of 19th century German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne, who investigated vision and the chemical processes involved in how the retina functions, and is said to have discovered the only human optogram on record.

The Museum of Optography is a reproduction of Ogbourne’s mind-space, where artist and mad scientist, fact and science fiction, the personal details of the artist’s own life and the universal questions and anxieties connected to the human condition, intertwine and struggle with one another. The audience is invited inside Ogbourne’s head chamber, to witness him contend with the inevitability of death and the human desire for some form of immortality - a posthumous legacy, a hologram, video or retinal image through which to be eternally remembered. We are invited to grapple, as Ogbourne has, with the realisation that we can never be ‘objectively’ remembered or preserved after death, that what’s ‘inside’ – the soul, spirit, personality, memories, the subject -  dies with the individual, and his or her immortal self will always be a mere reproduction, an approximation pieced together from the memories and interpretations of others. We watch, for example, a video of Ogbourne’s deceased grandmother on loop in the exhibition. She is singing a hymn. She is immortal, but only partially. Her image and voice live on through this video, but Ogbourne can only offer us his interpretation of her, which we will each process differently, creating many immortal manifestations and variations, but never fully resurrecting her.

In this sense, the Museum not only grapples with the fatality of life and the imagination’s morbid attraction to the looming specter of death, but with the limitations of memory, and with the impossibility of artistically reproducing one’s internal reality for the outside world to objectively perceive. Not even a camera mounted on the artist’s head - enabling the audience to see through his eyes – can actually communicate how he sees, how he processes the sensory information travelling through his retina, how he reacts to it viscerally and what inspires his reaction, and the memories, emotions and thoughts this information evokes. The Museum of Optography can, in a sense, be interpreted as an exhibition about the fundamental loneliness of the human condition, about our inability to ever share ourselves completely with others, and the impossibility of being remembered as we were as opposed to how others saw us, in the aftermath of our deaths.

“The museum is different every time,” Ogbourne explains. “It keeps getting more obsessive. I don’t know where to stop. I don’t know how to find the end, and ironically the whole thing is about the end. It’s like a human body, this Museum. Each object is integral to the whole.” Ogbourne was inspired to create this living, breathing, evolving Museum which the visitor could not only see and hear but smell and touch, because he felt that film and painting only allow artists to reproduce a “pale impression” of the world within them. “They’re flat – literally,” he explained. “But in the end there is no ideal medium, is there?” There is no way to pull the visitor completely into the skin and skull of the artist. At the end this project, he elaborated, “is about failure, in a way, about the failure of the scientist to finish his experiment.”