We Will Live, We Will See
Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open 2011
Zabludowicz Collection
176 Prince of Wales Road
London, NW5 3PT
www.zabludowiczcollection.com
The Zabludowicz Collection is delighted to announce We Will Live, We Will See, an exhibition that brings together 21 international artists whose practices examine the relationships between time, memory and forgetting.
Voicing accounts of lived experience ranging from the most personal and intimate in character to those shared and collective in scope, We Will Live, We Will See looks at modes of retelling and representing the past. The exhibition pursues the potential that art works may act as the lens through which the past is reconfigured, reinterpreted and made relevant today. We Will Live, We Will See draws upon such works to consider the past, not in terms of a normative ‘truth’, but rather in terms of unravelling, replaying and remaking.
Destabilising dominant chronologies and taxonomies of display is central to the works of Carol Bove, Steven Claydon, Rachel Harrison and Sherrie Levine. Their work looks at the importance of taste and humour, fiction and imagination while questioning assumed typologies and linear accounts of time. The arbitrary nature of events that inform the significance of sites and monuments is explored by Deimantas Narkevičius, while works by Geoffrey Farmer and Goshka Macuga incorporate material culled from books, to emphasise that art historical narratives—and culture in general—are collective in scope, and subject to remaking and reinterpretation. Omer Fast’s The Casting (2007) explores the construction of memory and the performative nature of retelling the past, highlighting the gaps in which the distinction between reality and representation, truth and fiction, can be blurred. The permanence of objects is a common preoccupation in the works of Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago, Edward Lipski, Matthew Monahan and Daniel Silver. Invoking art historical references from classicism, modernist sculpture and popular culture, these artists deal with the monumental and auratic nature of art and culture. Exploring methods and modes of display is key to many of these plinth-based works, which blur the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, question authenticity and examine their own relationships with primitivism and exoticism. The works of Mirosław Bałka, Phil Collins and Monika Sosnowska explore the gap between experience and retelling, producing and receiving, as potent sources for the proliferation of meaning. A newly commissioned work by Michael Dean addresses this multifarious nature of interpretation, exposing the fallacy of universal accounts of experience.
Eschewing the quest for absolute truths, We Will Live, We Will See explores horizontal rather than linear readings of time, revealing those instances in which fiction and forgetting creep in. Paying close attention to classification, typology and chronology, the exhibition examines moments in which these ordering structures are ruptured, allowing flaws and discrepancies to shine through.
We Will Live, We Will See is curated by Pavel S. Pyś, the winner of the inaugural Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open. The Open is an opportunity for an individual or collective from any creative field to produce an exhibition, with access to over 2,000 works by more than 600 artists represented in the Zabludowicz Collection. It responds to an urgent need for more opportunities for independent curators to experiment outside an institutional context, and is part of the Zabludowicz Collection’s commitment to supporting emerging artists and curators at key stages in their careers.
The Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open 2012 is open to creative practitioners over the age of 25, who have proven curatorial experience. The selection panel for the 2012 Open in comprised of Chris Dercon, Director, Tate Modern; Maria Lind, Director, Tensta Konsthall; Martin Herbert, Writer; Associate Editor, Art Review and Anita Zabludowicz, Founder, Zabludowicz Collection.
Deadline for applications: 1 November 2011
For further details and an application pack visit www.zabludowiczcollection.com
*Image above:
Photo courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin.
