Archive Exhibitions

The Silence - a fiction

2012-02-01 12:36

What: The Silence - A Fiction
Where: Villa Paloma, New National Museum of Monaco
When: 10am to 6pm daily, February to April
Tickets: €6.00
Contact: +377 98 98 48 60

Imagine you were an archaeologist or historian from another planet looking back at human existence from some point in the far distant future.  What would signs might we have left behind? What evidence would remain of our one-time great civilizations? Would there be anything left? Or would there be just a wasteland?

That was the brief for a new exhibition of photographs, videos and installations by twenty-five international artists invited to exhibit their work at the New National Museum of Monaco's Villa Paloma from February to April.


^{Photo © C. Gallo - Centre de Presse}

The Silence - A Fiction gathers together a body of contemporary artworks - from Arman's 'Accumulations' to the images of Hiroshi Sugimoto - to paint a picture of a world familiar yet foreign. In the space between science and fiction, the new exhibition invites the visitor on a journey of enormous imaginative power. Curator Simone Menegoi believes that the exhibition offers a 'fantastic account, a form of narrative décor which tells the story of a planet that has become uninhabitable for reasons unknown'.

These are landscapes - but not as we know them. Landscapes formed and re-formed by environmental disaster and economic collapse. Some, like the sculptures of the young American artist Michael E. Smith - are disturbing in their ordinariness. He specializes in putting together everyday items of waste collected in the urban desert of his home city, Detroit; his 'fossils' of our consumer culture present the viewer with a strong sense of a world completely abandoned.

Most apocalyptic is the work of Adrien Missika, whose journey to the gas-filled crater known as the 'Gateway to Hell' in central Turkmenistan is the subject of his video projection called Darvaza, which forms a major part of the narrative of this new exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, but also, unusually, by a work of fiction specially written by author Chris Sharp.

List of artists

Dove Allouche
Vladimir Arkhipov
Arman
Bartolomeo Bimbi
Maurice Blaussyld
Michel Blazy
Karl Blossfeldt
Brassaï
Peter Buggenhout
Carlos Casas
Romeo Castellucci
Lourdes Castro
Tony Cragg
Daniel Gustav Cramer
Geert Goiris
Jochen Lempert
Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre
Adrien Missika
Linda Fregni Nagler
Walter Pichler
Rudolf Polanszky
Pierre Savatier
Erin Shirreff
Michael E. Smith
Daniel Spoerri