We Will Live, We Will See

Mirosław Bałka, Carol Bove, Steven Claydon, Phil Collins, Aaron Curry, Michael Dean, Ruth Ewan, Geoffrey Farmer, Omer Fast, Rachel Harrison, Thomas Houseago, Marine Hugonnier, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Edward Lipski, Goshka Macuga, Matthew Monahan, Deimantas Narkevičius, Richard Prince, Daniel Silver, Monika Sosnowska

The Zabludowicz Collection is delighted to announce We Will Live, We Will See, an exhibition that brings together a number of international artists whose practices examine the relationships between time, memory and forgetting.

Voicing accounts of lived experience ranging from the most personal and intimate in character to those shared and collective in scope, We Will Live, We Will See looks at modes of retelling and representing the past. The exhibition pursues the potential that works of art may act as the lens through which the past is reconfigured, reinterpreted and made relevant today. Their meaning and specificity alters over time, producing a sense of temporality that is malleable and fluid. We Will Live, We Will See draws upon such works to consider the past, not in terms of a normative 'truth', but rather in terms of unravelling, replaying and remaking.

Destabilizing dominant chronologies and taxonomies of display is key to the works of Carol Bove, Steven Claydon, Rachel Harrison and Sherrie Levine. Their work looks at the importance of taste and humour, fiction and imagination while questioning assumed typologies and linear accounts of time. The arbitrary nature of events that inform the significance of sites and monuments is explored by Deimantas Narkevičius, while works by Geoffrey Farmer and Goshka Macuga incorporate material culled from books, emphasizing that art historical narratives - and culture in general - are collective in scope and subject to remaking and reinterpretation. Omer Fast's The Casting (2007) explores the construction of memory and the performative nature of retelling the past. Manipulating recorded image and speech, Fast's video installation exploits the gaps in which the distinction between reality and representation, truth and fiction, can be blurred. The permanence of objects is a common preoccupation in the works of Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago, Edward Lipski, Matthew Monahan and Daniel Silver. Invoking art historical references from classicism, modernist sculpture and popular culture, these artists deal with the monumental and auratic nature of art and culture. Exploring methods and modes of display is key to many of these plinth-based works, which blur the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, question authenticity and examine their own relationships with primitivism and exoticism. The works of Mirosław Bałka, Phil Collins and Monika Sosnowska explore the gap between experience and retelling, producing and receiving, as potent sources for the proliferation of meaning. A newly commissioned work by Michael Dean addresses this multifarious nature of interpretation, exposing the fallacy of universal accounts of experience.

We Will Live, We Will See takes into account the dangers of relying on objects to illuminate the past, working with the ambiguity and openness that characterise the multiplicity of voices and accounts of history. Eschewing the quest for absolute truths, the exhibition explores horizontal rather than linear readings of time, emphasizing those instances in which fiction and forgetting creep in. Paying close attention to classification, typology and chronology, the exhibition examines moments in which these ordering structures are ruptured, allowing flaws and discrepancies to shine through.

The exhibition, curated by Pavel S. Pyś, marks the culmination of the first annual Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open. Pyś was selected in March 2011 by a panel of judges comprised of Lisa Le Feuvre, James Lingwood, Mark Rappolt and Anita Zabludowicz. He has been granted unlimited access to the Zabludowicz Collection to realise the exhibition and its accompanying publication and public programme.

To download an essay by Pavel S. Pyś, click on the link on the right.