January 18 – March 10, 2007
Elephant Cemetery is an exhibition about objects and our relationship to them; it is about public space, and the art often found there; and it is about the mechanisms we devise when the object is missing and we are faced with its void.
Artists: Terence Gower & Pedro Reyes, David Maljkovic, Kirsten Pieroth, Pablo Pijnappel, Falke Pisano, Pia Rönicke, Tina Schulz, Jamie Shovlin, Kerry Tribe, Mario Garcia Torres.
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer
Originally, Elephant Cemetary was conceived as an exhibition about sculpture in a stricter sense; about the roles presence and absence might play as generators of meaning, and how they might become interchangeable in our perception; it was to be an exhibition about formal concerns, about the ways in which positive and negative volumes are essential sculptural terms. But over time, the hollow and the solid, positive and negative space, came to be understood not just as inert physical states, as descriptions of an object's protrusions and recessions, but also metaphorically, as an expanded notion of sculpture in relation to its surrounding and its audience. It thus became an exhibition about exaggerated states of presence and absence, about formal languages of monumentality and operations of memory as forces in aesthetic production. Such an understanding of these terms aims to keep at bay an immediate turn to sculpture's often commemorative roles in war memorials, public sites of remembrance, and other forms of (mainly secular) historic signification. And the function of meaning production. Instead of focusing on sculpture's meaning, this exhibition is about our role in its deciphering, about human scale and the human need to remember. Bringing together eleven international artists working in all media, Elephant Cemetery takes stock of the ways in which we engage with sculpture, how scale can trigger memories, and how a memory might serve as a starting point for a renewed engagement with objects.
