Le Silence, Une Fiction

LE SILENCE Une fiction gathers a corpus of contemporary works by 25 artists, ranging from Arman’s Accumulations to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, and together they present a world that is both strange and familiar, what curator Simone Menegoi refers to as “the story of a planet that has become uninhabitable for reasons unknown….” Part scientific experiment, part fictional narrative, the effect of these traces that our civilisation leaves behind is one of a reversal of history, as if the works between the pages, artifacts of our contemporary era, are being observed through the eyes of an archaeologist or anthropologist from the future.
The curators Simone Menegoi and Cristiano Raimondi have amassed a collection of prints, glass plates, sculptures, slides, video stills and paintings, that sit within the tradition of the landscape genre yet seen from a particular perspective: the aesthetics of the contemporary Sublime, drawing on the spectacle of environmental disasters and economic collapse. Another prominent group of works is comprised of sculptures and assemblages from artists, active since the 1960’s, who use every day and waste material to create. Work by American artist Michael E. Smith, whose sculptures are made from waste collected in his hometown, the urban desert of Detroit, completes the exhibition as ‘fossils’ of our consumer society.
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, Hiroshi Sugimoto