Allegory of the Cave Painting
a group exhibition with new work by Vincent Meessen
Opening: Friday, 19.09.2014 / 19:00
Exhibition: 20.09. – 07.12.2014
Location: Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp
Allegory of the Cave Painting
This extensive exhibition takes the prehistoric Bradshaw cave paintings as mental model. A 2010 archaeological research determined that the prehistoric Bradshaw cave paintings in the Australian Kimberley range had been colonized by red bacteria and black fungi, ‘living pigments’ whose rejuvenation and symbiosis account for the paintings’ vividness. At least 40.000 years old, the Bradshaw paintings maintain an idiosyncratic pictorial temporality and economy – or ecology – of signification. They are as much a product of prehistory as they are made now, in a radical contemporaneity.
The project, consisting of an exhibition in two parts and a reader, assembles artworks and ideas in a polyphonic response to ‘living pigments’, their impact on narratives about the birth of art and knowledge, contamination (an eminently productive force here) and colonization, art’s quest for ‘life’ or the threshold between image and embodiment.
La Cailloise
La Cailloise, a new and unique work by Vincent Meessen, meets the wish expressed by Marguerite Yourcenar (Brussels, 1903 – Bar Harbor, USA 1987) in her elegy to the late Roger Caillois. She hoped that one day, a stone would be named after the one who knew how to ‘listen to the great voice of things’. The ‘Cailloise’ refers to a stone, but contrary to the scientific logic, this name does not designate a certain category but a mineral and formal singularity : a unique and ancient fossil of a flower with an anthropomorphic look.
Participating artists:
Nina Beier, Jérôme Blumberg, Constantin Brâncuși, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Pavel Büchler, Jeremiah Day, Tacita Dean, Florian Dombois, Harun Farocki, Geert Goiris, Dan Graham, Ilana Halperin, Gary Hill, William Hogarth, Hans van Houwelingen, Ann Veronica Jannsens, Toril Johannessen, Sven Johne, Adrià Julià, Susanne Kriemann, Alon Levin, Frans Masereel, Dóra Maurer, Fabio Mauri, Michèle Matyn, Vincent Meessen, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Gustav Metzger, Ciprian Mureşan, Rosalind Nashashibi, Tom Nicholson, Navid Nuur, Miklós Onucsán, Susan Schuppli, Erin Shirreff, Paul Sietsema, Jonas Staal, Bernard Voïta, Phillip Warnell, Paola Yacoub, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
More information:
www.extracitykunsthal.be
www.middelheimmuseum.be
Location:
From 20.09. – 07.12.2014
Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday / 13:00 – 18:00
From 25.10.2014 – 29.03.2015
Braem Pavilion, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday / 10:00 – 17:00