Slide

A Handful of Dust
一掬塵土

Whitechapel Gallery

7 June – 3 September 2017

Whitechapel Gallery presents A Handful of Dust, bringing together artworks and documents, tracing a visual journey through the motif of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction and natural disasters to domestic dirt and forensics. Conceived by curator and writer David Campany as a speculative history of the 20th century, the exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including Robert Filliou, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards and film clips.

The starting point of the exhibition is a 1920 photograph taken by American artist Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp’s work in progress The Large Glass (1915–23) deliberately left to gather dust in his New York studio. First published in the seminal Surrealist journal, Littérature in 1922 and captioned as a ‘view from an aeroplane’, the photograph went on to appear in various journals, books and magazines, cropped and contextualized differently each time, before being formally titled Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) (1920) in 1964. The year 1922 was also marked the publication of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, the great poem reflecting on the modern era in the wake of the First World War. The poem includes the line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ from which the title of this exhibition is drawn.

Man Ray/Marcel Duchamp Élevage de poussière 1920 Gelatin silver print – printed c. 1968 © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017

Highlights include Robert Burley’s photograph Demolition of Buildings 64 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, New York (2007) of the headquarters of the analogue film manufacturer being flattened after the company ceased to produce film. Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu’s image titled Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation and Fire, Nagasaki (1961) is part of a group of photographs commissioned by the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, and depicts a glass bottle mutated by an atomic bomb. Walker Evans’ Erosion Mississippi (1938) documents the rural landscape in the United States during the Depression, while Aaron Siskind’s images of scarred urban walls recall abstract expressionist painting.

Works by these renowned photographers are on display alongside examples of photojournalism, such an image of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s car. A mechanic is shown with dirty hands from the thickly dust-laden automobile, which was abandoned in a Milan garage after it carried Mussolini to his death. He was riding in it when captured by Italian partisans and shot on 28 April 1945.

A Handful of Dust was originally conceived for Le Bal, Paris in 2015. A version was presented at the Pratt Institute, New York in 2016 and it will also travel on to Moderna Museet, Stockholm in September-December 2018.

 

Mona Kuhn Ruins in Reverse 2012 Medium and size: Chromogenic print 51 x 51 cm/ 20 x 20 in © Mona Kuhn, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

《一掬塵土》6月7日至9月2日期間于白教堂畫廊展出,展覽集結了不同的藝術品與文獻,是一場以微小塵埃為主題的視覺之旅,展現了20世紀戰時空中偵查,戰爭毀滅與自然災難的歷史場景。這場展覽展出了超過30位藝術家與攝影師的作品,以及相關雜誌報道、新聞照片、明信片與電影片段。

展覽由1920年的一張照片作為開端,這張照片是美國藝術家曼·雷在杜尚紐約工作室中拍攝到的沉積在杜尚作品《大玻璃(1915 – 23)》上的灰塵。在1922年這張照片首次刊登在一本開創性的超現實主義雜誌《文學(Littérature)上,標題為“來自飛機的視角”的照片。在1964年被正式命名為“累積灰塵之前,曾多次以不同的語境出現在不同的報道、書籍以及雜誌中。

“我將為你展示一把塵埃里的恐懼。”這句詩出自英國詩人T·S·艾略特1992年創作的《荒野》,本次展覽的標題就是從中而來。

本次展覽的亮點包括羅伯特·伯利2007年創作的一系列作品,作品展示的是膠片公司在停止生產膠片后被夷為平地的歷史。還有日本攝影師東松照明以原子彈輻射與火災為主題的攝影作品,呈現出一個1961年在長崎在原子彈輻射影響下被熔化了的像肉一般的玻璃瓶。沃克·埃文斯的攝影作品展現出美國經濟大蕭條時廣闊的鄉村風貌,同時阿倫·西斯金關於滿目瘡痍的都市作品,讓人禁不住聯想到抽象主義的畫作。

展覽還一併呈現了新聞攝影中的經典之作,其中包括意大利獨裁者本托尼·墨索里尼的車。一位機械師用佈滿灰塵的雙手展示出一輛佈滿厚厚的灰塵的汽車,當這輛車在墨索里尼死後被遺棄在美國的一個車庫里,1945年4月28日,意大利游擊隊拍攝到墨索里尼乘坐這輛車的照片。

《一掬塵土》2015首次在法國巴黎Le Bal被展出,并于2016年在紐約Pratt Institute進行展覽,同時,也會在2018年在斯德哥爾摩的Moderna Museet再次展出。

 

時間: 2017年6月7日至2017年9月3日

地點: 白教堂畫廊

                   

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