Elephant Cemetery

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. Originally, it 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 such an understanding pronounces the languages of monumentality and memory as separate, rather than joined and bounded by the function of meaning production. Instead of focusing on sculpture’s meaning, this exhibition is about our role it 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.

Elephant Cemetery
Kurator: Christian Rattemeyer

mit Mario Garcia Torres, Terence Gower, David Maljkovic, Kirsten Pieroth, Pablo Pijnappel, Falke Pisano, Pedro Reyes, Pia Rönicke, Tina Schulz, Jamie Shovlin, Kerry Tribe