The Traveling Show

If time is the great theme of literature, displacement is the great theme of the objects. In literature, words, sentences and histories are re-articulated by means of memory and forgetting, undergoing changes through time – that mighty sculptor, in the words of Marguerite Yourcenar. Our perception changes over the course of a day, a year or a life. In the world of the objects, everything is in permanent movement: the world turns, blood circulates in our veins, we cross the street, the city, and the geography. In this context, every exhibition is in some way about traveling. The artworks migrate from the artist’s studio or from a collection to a gallery or museum; they are regrouped, recontextualized, juxtaposed to others. Everything here has suffered some sort of displacement. The result—the precise arrangement of the objects in space—is also an invitation to travel, for the encounter or discovery of different itineraries through the reading of the objects, their histories and experiences.

The Traveling Show is an exhibition about trips, passages, journeys, shipments, displacements and cartographies. Chronologically, the exhibition begins in 19th-century Mexico, with a group of European travelers who visited the country: Octavio D’Alvimar, Henri Pierre Léon Pharamond Blanchard, Baron de Gros and Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck. Mexico’s Plaza Mayor (Zócalo) is a recurrent motif in the period, and the version presented here is the first made by a foreigner; its author, D’Alvimar, was a French General who was twice deported from Mexico for espionage. Two exceptional paitings from the Museo Soumaya appear as historical counterpoints to the contemporary, indicating two distinct 19th-century European views of Mexico: awe in light of the unknown (in Gros’ cave) and the construction of a fictitious past (in Waldeck’s ceremony). Two other travelers, from the 20th and 18th century, are referenced by contemporary artists in the exhibition. Tamar Guimarães, Steven Lam, Eric Anglès, Runo Lagomarsino and Sarah Lookofsky appropriate a passage from the text Mornings in Mexico, from 1927, by English writer D. H. Lawrence. Mark Dion followed the trail of North American explorer William Bartram through the southern United States during the 18th century.

In chronological sequence, we find a group of artists associated with the 1960s and ’70s who explored the relations between art and geography, displacement and territory: Vito Acconci, Alighiero e Boetti, Andre Cadere, Lygia Clark, Eugenio Dittborn, Juan Downey, Dan Graham, Douglas Heubler, On Kawara, Robert Kinmont, Richard Long, Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane, Claudio Perna, Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner. A group of contemporary artists working with video and film play with the traveling shot, the road movie or the journey: Allora & Calzadilla, Darren Almond, Cao Guimarães, Marine Hugonnier, Fernando Ortega, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Santiago Sierra and Carla Zaccagnini. In this context, two works in video are counterpoints to moving images of trips: one composed by movie-like credits in text form (by Mike Bouchet), the other by biographical statements (by Dias & Riedweg). At the physical center of the exhibition, which is designed to evoke a compass, an installation by Eduardo Basualdo, articulating displacement, time and light by means of gyratory elements, maps, fire and a faceless character. In the intercrossing of so many paths, other contemporary artists resort to different manners to explore in multiple ways a succession of elements related to traveling: bicycles, trucks, boats, airplanes, suitcases, postcards, maps, travel albums, airplane tickets, passports and intruders (a complete survey of all neon sculptures produced by Claire Fontaine in the series Foreigners Everywhere). If the objects gathered here speak of displacement, we also displace ourselves in space to apprehend them. Thus, new journeys are overlain atop others, repeatedly and successively. As in literature.

Adriano Pedrosa, Curator

The Traveling Show
Kurator: Adriano Pedrosa

Künstler: Vito Acconci, Franz Ackermann / Michel Majerus, Doug Aitken, Allora & Calzadilla, Darren Almond, Francis Alÿs, Eduardo Basualdo, Walead Beshty, Mike Bouchet, Alighiero e Boetti, Andre Cadere, Jota Castro, Lygia Clark, Octavio D´Alvimar, Thomas Demand, Dias & Riedweg, Mark Dion, Eugenio Dittborn, Juan Downey, Lara Favaretto, Fischli / Weiss, CLAIRE FONTAINE , Thomas Glassford, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Dan Graham, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gros / Baron de Gros, Cao Guimaraes, Tamar Guimaraes, Steven Lam, Eric Angles, Runo Lagomarsino and Sara Lookofsky, Andreas Gursky, Louise Hopkins, Douglas Huebler, Carlos Huffmann, Marine Hugonnier, On Kawara, Robert Kinmont, Runo Lagomarsino, Jac Leirner, Richard Long, Jarbas Lopes, Mateo Lopez, Ana Mendieta, Aleksandra Mir, Jonathan Monk, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Gina Pane, Diego Perez, Claudio Perna, Rosangela Renno, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Santiago Sierra, Robert Smithson, Emanuel Tovar, Adriana Varejao, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Jean-Frederic de Waldeck, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Carla Zaccagnini