The exhibitions Urgent Conversations: Athens–Antwerp and Urgent Conversations: Antwerp – Athens are a collaboration between EMST and M HKA, a theoretical and visual dialogue, based on works from the collections of both museums, which includes more than 70 works structured in 22 topics.
28.04.2017 - 07.01.2018
M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen - Leuvenstraat 32, 2000 Antwerpen
EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Kallirrois Avenue & Amvr. Frantzi Str., Athens 11743
Charts is a series of four drawings where pseudo-scientific graphs gain organic forms together with absurd titles and labels. These comical and childlike elements subvert the primary function of a chart and manage to humanize it as well as deprive it of its usual authority.
“I often think about a division that is the classical division in Western philosophy and culture: the physical versus the mental, the ideal versus the material, intellectual versus sensual. What I am trying to work out is my own theory so that I will not feel so stupid, because I always embarrass myself being unable to make the division. Maybe I am trying with my work to challenge the dichotomy that these things are physical and those things are mental, and that you cannot combine the two.” [full text here]
In one of the drawings, Durham plays with the words Start/Stop and Star/Top in the same way as in his monumental installation Something (Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy).