Peter Friedl
The Diaries
10 October 2014–1 February 2015
contemporary art centre – la synagogue de Delme
33, rue R. Poincaré
F-57590 Delme
France
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 2–6pm,
Sunday 11am–6pm
T +33 (0) 3 87 01 43 42
cac.delme@wanadoo.fr
The centre d’art contemporain – la synagogue de Delme is pleased to present the solo exhibition The Diaries by Peter Friedl. Since his early beginnings, writing and drawing—in the broadest sense—have been core activities of Friedl’s artistic practice, in which critical intimacy, displacement, political awareness, conceptual transfers, and new models of narration play an important role. For the first time, all of the artist’s handwritten diaries from 1981 to 2014 will be on view in Delme.
More than 300 closed notebooks are displayed in piles within specially designed museum showcases. As is often the case with Friedl’s projects, juxtaposition and overexposure are the exhibition’s very dynamics. In fact, The Diaries is an epic staging of real time, memory, volume, and text on paper. Thousands upon thousands of densely filled pages covering a period of over 30 years testify to the impossibility of capturing bare life in words.
Like Friedl’s other long-term projects such as Playgrounds (since 1995) and Theory of Justice (1992–2010)—both based on documentary photographic images—his diary installation is astudy in narration and is open to change.
As private books and authentic documents authored equally by professional writers and amateurs, diaries sit ambivalently on the threshold of literature and history. Their centuries-long tradition has given rise to many ways of constructing, documenting and revoking subjectivity. By blocking access to the contents of his enshrined, closed diaries, Peter Friedl invites the viewer to contemplate the multi-layered meaning of how aesthetic experience and imagination work. In an era of open access and ubiquitous surveillance, overabundant communication and information, the artist’s “real allegory” takes on critically new importance. It questions the power of display and imagination, the drama of form and content as well as the fragility of autonomy.
The Diaries plays with notions of the anachronistic, precarious, and unfinished. Yet Friedl’s installation subverts the myth of immediacy in order to offer an alternative composed of withdrawal, silence, and introspection. Simple, mundane activities such as reading and writing become tools and aids for potential resistance and emancipation.
As a visual prologue to the diary project, the exhibition will include a selection of Friedl’s own childhood drawings from the 1960s. Like the notebooks, the authenticating medium of the drawing can be experienced as a piece of material culture.
Peter Friedl (born 1960) is an artist who lives in Berlin. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MoMA PS1, New York; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has participated in documenta X (1997) and documenta 12 (2007), the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2004), the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006), Manifesta 7, Trento (2008), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), the 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008), La Triennale, Paris (2012), the Taipei Biennial (2012), and the 12th São Paulo Architecture Biennale (2013).
Selected solo exhibitions include OUT OF THE SHADOWS: what is written cannot be unwritten, Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004); the retrospective survey Work 1964–2006, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miami Art Central, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille (2006–07); Blow Job, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2008); Working, Kunsthalle Basel (2008); Peter Friedl, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2010); King Kong, Le Lieu unique, Nantes (2013); and The Dramatist, Artspace Auckland (2014).
La synagogue de Delme Centre for Contemporary Art is grateful for support from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Lorraine contemporary art authority (DRAC), the regional and departmental governments of Lorraine and Moselle, and the municipality of Delme. La synagogue de Delme Centre for Contemporary Art is a member of DCA–Association pour le Développement des Centres d’Art.
Director
Marie Cozette
Press contact
Pierre Viellard: communication [at] cac-synagoguedelme.org
www.cac-synagoguedelme.org/presse
