I Cling to Virtue is a commission from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and presents a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and videos that reveal the intricate trajectories of the Lövy Singh clan, an eccentric East London family of mixed descent.

The project takes the grand historical, literary and cinematic traditions of the family saga simultaneously as its starting point and point of departure. By placing the incomplete memory of Monarch Lövy Singh as the curatorial voice of the exhibition, the artists do not propose a single, progressive, coherent story of his family, nor of the century through which his family lived, but rather one that is multiple and fragmentary.

One of the ways the artists accomplish this is by thoroughly mixing Monarch’s memories with their own. The effect of their approach is to bring artefact and artifice into a perfectly blurred distinction.

The commission adopts the form of an exhibition that stages family stories as the most intimate of possessions and yet the most impersonal, as if an entire century or epoch could be distilled in a recording device, or a child’s game, or a marriage gift.