Curated by John Chilver - Artists: Chilver, John; Afrassiabi, Shahin; Ash, Jesse; Bauer, Diann; Bedwell, Simon A.; Billy, Vanessa; Bolivar, Juan; Burton, Adam; Carneiro da Cunha, Tiago; Coleman and Hogarth, Kim and Jenny; Cumberland, Stuart; Dany, Hans-Christian; Frearson, Annabel; Freee, Freee; Ghazi, Babak; Ghosts Eat Mirrors, Ghosts Eat Mirrors; Glogan, Jeremy; Gottelier, Luke; Gruenfeld, Thomas; Hemsworth, Gerard; Higashionna, Yuichi; Holmes, Emma; Jones, Gareth; Kartscher, Kerstin; Kollectiv, Pil and Galia; Lowe, Brigrid; Macuga, Goshka; Makh, Ellen; Pettitt, Daniel; Reski, Gunter; Rosler, Martha; Schultze, Michael; Sill, Heidi; Simpson, D. J.; Strange, Jack; Stubbs, Michael; Timberlake, John; Verzutti, Erika; Vinitsky, Yonatan and Wright, Carla
This was an exhibition of artworks by 40 artists. Works included collages, drawings, posters, archival materials in files, paintings on canvas, prints, sculptures, a video projection and a spoken performance. The focus of the project was collage. But instead of simply presenting a variety of objects and images that could be immediately recognised as collage, the exhibition was designed to invite viewers to question the boundaries of the category. So photomontages were shown alongside archive materials, text works, sound works and video, etc., such that a narrow conception of collage as a single specifiable material process was challenged.
The curatorial stance was intended to work in dialogue with art-theoretical notions of ‘appropriation’ (associated with art of the 1980s) and ‘postproduction’ (associated with the 2000s and the influential book of that title by critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud); the exhibition questioned the neat separations between these genres and their associated historical moments, and indicated deeper continuities between, e.g., high modernist photomontage and appropriation in terms of problematics of consumption/production, passivity/creativity, violation/recreation.
The selection of the artists followed a period of researching artworks, visiting galleries, sifting through gallery archives, as well as visiting studios and meeting artists. The presentation of the works in the gallery space was intended to be excessive, full of juxtapositions and detail that invited close scrutiny by the viewer.
