Tuesday, September 22, 2015

David Campany returns to Le Bal with a Handful of Dust and a book from MACK


 
It is good to see that David Campany returns to Le Bal, Paris with another group show - a Handful of Dust - which I'm sure will rival in impact and substance his 2010 show at Le Bal, ANONYMES. You can see my blog post on that exhibition HERE.
Working mainly with photography, David Campany is a ground-breaking writer, curator and artist in is own right, his new outing at Le Bal will not disappoint!
The show runs 16 October 2015 – 17 January 2016 and includes works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Jeff Wall and many others, alongside anonymous press photos, postcards, magazine spreads and movies.

Supporting the show is a catalogue / bookwork from MACK. They say this: a Handful of Dust is David Campany’s speculative history of the last century, and a visual journey through some of its unlikeliest imagery. Let’s suppose the modern era begins in October of 1922. A little French avant-garde journal publishes a photograph of a sheet of glass covered in dust. The photographer is Man Ray, the glass is by Marcel Duchamp. At first they called it a view from an aeroplane. Then they called it Dust Breeding. It’s abstract, it’s realist. It’s an artwork, it’s a document. It’s revolting and compelling. Cameras must be kept away from dust but they find it highly photogenic. At the same time, a little English journal publishes TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” And what if dust is really the key to the intervening years? Why do we dislike it? Is it cosmic? We are stardust, after all. Is it domestic? Inevitable and unruly, dust is the enemy of the modern order, its repressed other, its nemesis. But it has a story to tell from the other side. Campany’s connections range far and wide, from aerial reconnaisance and the American dustbowl to Mussolini’s final car journey and the wars in Iraq. 

You can go to MACK BOOKS, HERE and David Campany's website HERE.

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