Review of the exhibition "What cannot be used is forgotten" in the May issue of frieze
Wed, Apr 29 2015
Entrance to the group exhibition "Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie".
As reported earlier in this channel, at the end of last January we visited the exhibition 'Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie' (What Cannot be Used is Forgotten)' (on view until 3 May 2015) at CAPC musée d'art coontemporain in Bordeaux.
Curated by Mexico-based Colombian-born curator Catalina Lozano, the exhibition presents the work of Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Sven Augustijnen, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Lynch, Pauline M’Barek, Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Uriel Orlow, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Jorge Satorre.
Below is a fragment of Max Andrews' frieze review, published in the May 2015 issue of frieze magazine (#171):
‘What cannot be used is forgotten’ proposed a biographical approach to objects and the histories and allegiances they can constitute. With an emphasis on eroding the legacy of colonial-era ethnography and archaeology, the exhibition comprised the contributions of ten artists who emphasized the accrual and dispersal of objects' meaning over time. Objects were broken apart, animated, revered, rumoured, memorized, melted; or – as in Pauline M’Barek’s sculptures mimicking display stands for imagined wooden masks – missing altogether. Sometimes, objects were not comfortably objects at all, but textiles or techniques. Occasionally they were alibis employed to provoke historical revision and necessitate textual commentary. In Uriel Orlow’s A Very Fine Cast (110 years) (2007), works ingested past traces of such commentary (captions taken from European museums’ descriptions of the Benin Bronzes robbed by the British punitive Benin Expedition of 1897).
– Max Andrews
Installation view of Sean Lynch's 'A blog-by-blow account of stone-carving in Oxford' (2014).
General view of the exhibition. (Right Wall) Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico (Community Museum of the Xico Valley).
Report from Bordeaux: Visit to CAPC/Musée d'Art Contemporain's shows of Franz Ehrard Walther and the group show "Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie" (27 January 2015)
Review of Maria Thereza Alves' exhibition at CAAC Sevilla published in frieze magazine (9 March 2015)
art-agenda review on Andrea Büttner show "Tische", at NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona (21 July 2014)
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