Kader Attia
Untitled (Skyline), 2007
Courtesy : BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Courtesy Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris
©Colin Davison
Allan deSouza
The Goncourt Brothers stand between Caesar
and the Thief of Bagdad, 2003
Courtesy : Allan deSouza and Talwar Gallery,
New York / New Delhi
Dreamlands – the world of Art Fairs at the Centre Pompidou, Paris Occupying the Grande Galerie at Centre Pompidou from 5 May to 9 August2010, the exhibition Dreamlands will consider for the first time the questionof how World’s Fairs, international exhibitions, theme parks and kindredinstitutions have influenced ideas about the city and the way it is used.]]>
Source: Centre Pompidou, Paris
Duplicating and reduplicating reality through the creation of replicas, embracingan aesthetic of accumulation and collage that is often close to kitsch, theseself-enclosed parallel worlds have frequently afforded inspiration tothe artistic, architectural and urbanistic practices of the twentieth century,and may even be said to have served as models for certain contemporaryconstructions.
This multidisciplinary exhibition will bring together more than 300 works:modern and contemporary art, architecture, films and documents drawnfrom numerous public and private collections.
Designed as an experience both playful and educational, it will offer the firstcomprehensive exploration of its theme, inviting visitors to think about howthe city is imagined and how this imagination finds expression in concreteprojects.
World’s Fairs, contemporary theme parks, the Las Vegas of the 1950s and ’60s,twenty-first-century Dubai: all these have helped bring about a profoundtransformation in our relation to the world, our conceptions of geography,time and history, our ideas about the original and the reproduction, about artand non-art.
The dreamlands of the leisure society have shaped the imagination, nourishingboth utopian dreams and artistic productions. But they have also becomerealities: the pastiche, the copy, the artificial and the fictive have becomefacts of the environment in which real life is led, and they serve as modelsfor understanding and planning the urban fabric and its social life, blurringthe boundaries between imagination and reality.
From Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus pavilion for the New York World’s Fairof 1939 to such manifestoes as Venturi and Brown’s Learning from Las Vegasand Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (which reads Manhattan throughConey Island’s Dreamland), the sixteen sections of the exhibition will tracethe history of a complex and problematic relationship.
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