EXHIBITION

Votive

The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow City, Glasgow, 12/05/2009 - 01/30/2010

350 Sauchiehall Street

ABOUT

Curated for CCA by Sarah Lowndes, Votive brings together works by leading international artists including; Chris Burden, USA; Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mexico; Thea Djordjadze, Germany; Torsten Lauschmann, UK and 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright, UK.

The exhibition will also include artifacts from the World Cultures Collection of Glasgow Museums which have rarely, if ever, been exhibited. Also the seminal Chair Event, 1969, by Fluxus artist George Brecht, who died last year and whose work has rarely been shown in Scotland.

For the opening night of Votive, Basque singer Nerea Bello, noted for her extraordinary vocal range and powerful delivery, devised a song performance in response to the other works in the exhibition. A recording of this performance will be played at intervals within the exhibition space.

Votive will examine the idea of object as event, addressing the idea of performativity enshrined in the votive offering. A votive offering either expresses a wish or is given in thanks for a wish fulfilled. It is therefore both sculptural, existing in space, and performative, existing in time, as an event and thereafter as a memory.

Many of the objects included in the exhibition have qualities similar to amulets, charms and talismans, which work by magical and not physical means. Johan Huizinga, in his important study of the play element in culture, Homo Ludens (1940), observed that ‘[…] in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.’ This activity, the act of representation, the creation of a second, poetic world, is the focus of Votive.

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