So wonderful to have been included in this exhibition curated by David Campany at Le Bal in Paris. Below is a link to the exhibition and a book (published by Mack) which includes a fantastic essay by Campany.
Dust – unwanted, inevitable, destructive – is the great suppressed substance of the modern age. The world of order and hygiene attempts to banish dust yet it will always return.
The exhibition takes as its starting point two significant events that happened in Europe in October 1922. In the Parisian journal Littérature, Man Ray published his photograph of dust gathering on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (where it was title ‘Vue Prise en Aeroplane’); and in the London journal The Cirterion TS Eliot published his modernist masterwork The Waste Land containing the immortal lines:
‘AND I WILL SHOW YOU SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM EITHER
YOUR SHADOW AT MORNING STRIDING BEHIND YOU
OR YOUR SHADOW AT EVENING RISING TO MEET YOU; I WILL SHOW YOU FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST.’ T.S. ELIOT
From this beginning the exhibition takes in aerial photography, forensic photography, abstractions of landscapes, ruins, postcards and press photos of the American dust storms, artists’ videos, film clips, documentary photography and site specific works, featuring artists like Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Aaron Siskind, Gerhard Richter, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Eva Stenram, Georges Bataille, Jeff Wall, among others.
David Campany
“…the book somehow wends its way to aerial reconnaissance photography, abstract landscapes, forensics, American dust storms, artists’ videos and the Iraq War. The cumulative effect is brilliant, almost novelistic, and the book comes with a removable insert featuring an equally brilliant essay by Campany.”
Teju Cole, The New York Times