London’s Hayward Gallery sends 'Curiosity' show to Amsterdam

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'Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing' – first major international Hayward Touring show to open in Amsterdam

28 June – 14 September 2014

Prins Hendrikkade 142
1011 AT, Amsterdam

Hayward Touring is holding its first major exhibition, ‘Curiosity’, to be presented internationally. de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam is the site of a startling exhibition that moves between contemporary art,  anatomy, Old Master drawings, the history of criminology, cold war secrets, the origins  of museums and voyeurism in everyday life. The exhibition is curated by Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine. It takes as a starting point the cabinets of curiosities that flourished throughout Europe in the 17th century. Contemporary artists included are Tacita Dean, Nina Katchadourian, Matt Mullican, Katie Paterson and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Their work appears alongside historical works and objects by Albrecht Dürer, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka and Galileo Galilei.

de Appel is one of Amsterdam's most important and well-established spaces for contemporary art with  an influential curatorial studies department. Historical works will be introduced into the exhibition with loans from the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam’s museum of ethnography), the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden and the University of Leiden Library. These were not seen in the UK edition of the exhibition. 

The exhibition met with public and critical acclaim when shown last year at Turner Contemporary in Margate, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and Art Gallery Newlyn and The Exchange, Penzance.

The exhibition juxtaposes past and present, to create a picture of knowledge and invention that is encyclopaedic but highly eccentric. Contemporary works include Nina Katchadourian’s sly and hilarious photographs made on long-haul flights: the artist  disappears into the aircraft toilet and, using materials to hand, photographs herself in the costumes  and poses of 17th-century Flemish portraiture. Back in her seat, she composes landscapes and animal studies out of in-flight magazines and meals.

Attention and concentration are recurrent themes of the exhibition: under hypnosis, Matt Mullican videos himself becoming deeply interested in his own shoe and other objects. Tacita Dean films the artist Claes Oldenburg in his studio as he cleans the objects on his bookshelves. Katie Paterson invites us to pore over identical images of darkness sourced from observatories all around the world. Gerard Byrne films and photographs the territory around Loch Ness, and produces a compelling map of the frontiers between art, science and fantasy.

Visitors to 'Curiosity' will encounter these recent works among an intriguing array of historical artefacts, including a collection of  ravishingly patterned and coloured stones that belonged to the Surrealist writer Roger Caillois, part of the long tradition of artists who have projected their visions onto the natural world. The 19th-century German  glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka did not call themselves artists, but they produced an astonishing array of lifelike models of aquatic  creatures: still used as teaching aids, these hover somewhere between works of art and scientific specimens.

But curiosity has a less alluring history too; the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a scholarly-artistic institute based in Los Angeles, will exhibit Rolodexes and index cards that once belonged to the US nuclear facility at Los Alamos: bearing the names and addresses of contractors hired by the government, they attest to an era of intense military-industrial secrecy.

Brian Dillon, curator, said: 
Curiosity is the desire to uncover what lies beyond our present understanding of the world.  Alongside wonder, which was traditionally considered the origin of philosophy, curiosity is valued because it leads us into new territories. But historically it has been condemned, too, as a form of distraction, an attraction to novelty for its own sake or a desire to unveil what is actually none of our  business. Like the cabinet of curiosities, which mixed science and art, ancient and modern, reality and fiction, this exhibition refuses to choose between knowledge and pleasure. It juxtaposes historical periods and categories of objects to produce an eccentric map of curiosity in its many senses.

Roger Malbert, Senior Curator, Hayward Touring, said,
With its eclectic mix, Curiosity has had a remarkably wide appeal during its UK tour. It was clearly enjoyed by everyone from young children to senior academics. It is a privilege to be working with de Appel on a showing in Amsterdam, one of the great historical centres of the enlightenment, where the show will have a special resonance. Hayward Touring exhibitions were seen by over 750,000 people in around 50 towns and cities across the UK. We are delighted to extend our reach further, with a showing in the Netherlands.

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing includes work by Salvatore Arancio, Rudolph & Leopold Blaschka, Corrine May Botz, Pablo Bronstein, Roger Caillois, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Gerard Byrne, Nina Canell, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Tacita Dean, Albrecht Dürer, Gunda Förster, Aurélien Froment, Galileo Galilei, Laurent Grasso, Thomas Grünfeld, Susan Hiller, Robert Hooke, Ferrante Imperato, Toril Johannessen, Nina Katchadourian, Jeremy Millar, Matt Mullican, Katie Paterson, Aura Satz, Miroslav Tichý and Richard Wentworth.

Aura Satz will present a new performance ‘Blink Comparator: Her Luminous Distance' over the opening weekend and Nina Katchadourian will take part in a Q&A with the curator Brian Dillon. Katie Paterson's work 'Campo del Cielo / Field of the Sky' – a meteorite that has been melted down and recast as a replica of itself, shown at Curiosity’s opening venue in Margate - will be returned to space, docking with the International Space Station in late July. Paterson will screen the resulting footage at the end of the exhibition. 

Katie Paterson's work featured in 'Republic of the Moon' at the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf in January 2014. See review in Cassone, January 2014