Artists appearing in the archive: Francis Alÿs, Mari Andrews, Olga Balema, Eduardo T. Basualdo, Vanessa Billy, Katinka Bock, Brassaï, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, Nina Canell, Lenka Clayton, Hubert Duprat, Jimmie Durham, William Dyce, Max Ernst, Fischli and Weiss, Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard, Dominique Ghesquière, Piero Gilardi, Andy Goldsworthy, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Michael Heizer, David Hockney, Jim Hodges, Matt Hoyt, Pierre Huyghe, Daniel Keller, Ernests Kļaviņš, Adrian Köhler, Irene Kopelman, Susumu Koshimizu, Jannis Kounellis, Gabriel Kuri, Alicja Kwade, Nicolás Lamas, Guillaume Leblon, Seung-Taek Lee, Jochen Lempert, Jacopo Ligozzi, Vasko Lipovac, Jason Loebs, Richard Long, Marie Lund, Maanantai Collective, Rene Magritte, Didier Marcel, Jacopo Miliani, Helen Mirra, Marcelo Moscheta, Jean-Luc Moulène, Kate Newby, Isamu Noguchi, Navid Nuur, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Marlo Pascual, Ugo Rondinone, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Jorge Satorre, Bryan Savitz, Kurt Schwitters, Nobuo Sekine, Robert Smithson, Kishio Suga, Stephane Thidet, Francisco Tropa, Cy Twombly, Lee Ufan, Benjamin Valenza, Ruth Van Beek, Fabio Viscogliosi, Mark Wallinger, Hannah Weinberger, Nicole Wermers
Exhibition title: An Archive of Stones, to be periodically activated, speculated upon, damaged and finally gilded with fiction
Curated by: Chris Sharp
Exhibition guides: Kaspars Groševs, Ainārs Kamoliņš, Toms Ķencis, Ieva Kraule, Anda Lāce, Santa Mičule, Tomass Pārups, Laura Prikule, Maija Rudovska, Elīna Sproģe
Venue: kim?, Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia
Date: August 14 – September 27, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and kim?, Contemporary Art Centre, Riga
An Archive of Stones, to be periodically activated, speculated upon, damaged and finally gilded with fiction is a project which addresses the use and significance of stones in contemporary art, as well as their narrative or linguistic potential. Neither an exhibition nor a lecture in traditional terms, this project is, if anything, an archive that is meant to be activated through narrative, speculation and inevitably, misinterpretation. Intended to function not only as an interrogation, which is not so much exhaustive as it is comprehensive, of the use of stones in contemporary art, but also as an ad-hoc, ever changing ritual based on the reading of stones. Taking the most rudimentary, mute, supposedly meaningless and indigent objects of so-called pre-civilization, which have already been rendered strange through their transformation into objects of culture through art, the archive proposes to function as a language itself– a language whose signification and mode have yet to be determined. For instance, while this language could function in the most fundamental way, as in tools for every day living, gesturing, at best, new, if primitive forms, it could also be of a more divinatory or mystical order, depending on who uses it and how they do so.
– Chris Sharp
