“Dust is everywhere. In our houses, our factories.”
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
Writer, curator, and artist, David Campany is author of many works, including [LIST]. He has published over 150 essays on the history of photography and has contributed, among others, to Aperture, Frieze, Photoworks, and Source, as well as founded the PA Magazine. He is a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award, the Krazna-Krauss Book Award, the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society Award for his writings. David Campany teaches at the University of Westminster, London.
Most recently, he curated the Walker Evans exhibition at the Rencontres de la Photographie 2015 in Arles, and two retrospectives of Victor Burgin’s work in London in 2013. In 2010, he co-curated the inaugural exhibition at LE BAL, Anonymous: Unnamed America in Photography and Film.
EXHIBITION
A Handful of Dust
Until January 17th, 2016
BAL
6, impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris
France
http://www.le-bal.fr
