Eclipse

The artists featured use installation, sculpture, performance, video projection and painting as their media to explore and formulate subjects that are dark or irrational. Many of them have a special sense of the absurdity of life, resulting in a refreshing sense of humour. Existential issues concerning the condition of mankind is the starting point. The exhibition pursues two main tracks: one sombre, mystical and terse, the other more anarchic and burlesque.

Magnus af Petersens, curator, Moderna Museet: “Eclipse is both a statement and a question about art today. If artists in the 90s were preoccupied with reality, a stance that could be expressed, for instance, in documentary strategies and relational aesthetics, many artists today are more interested in speculation, in reflecting the incomprehensible. It may sound drastic to say that we are living in a dark age. But after 11 September, in an era of political upheaval, we are seeing a rise in intolerance. The exhibition highlights art that is not political in a simplistic way, but asserts its right to say the wrong thing, art that uses the license of fiction to experiment.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue will be published, with essays by Magnus af Petersens, INS – International Necronautical Society, and others. The INS essay, written by the group’s General Secretary Tom McCarthy, will also form part of their work shown in Eclipse.

Artists

Lucas Ajemian, Michaël Borremans, Nathalie Djurberg, Ellen Gallagher, Tom McCarthy/INS – International Necronautical Society, Paul McCarthy, Mike Nelson, Anri Sala and Dana Schutz.

Curator: Magnus af Petersens
Assistant Curator: Fredrik Liew