Open: Tue-Sun 11am-4pm with advance booking

30 Pembroke Street, OX1 1BP, Oxford, United Kingdom
Open: Tue-Sun 11am-4pm with advance booking


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KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality

Modern Art Oxford, Oxford

Sat 12 Nov 2016 to Sat 31 Dec 2016

30 Pembroke Street, OX1 1BP KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality

Tue-Sun 11am-4pm with advance booking

Modern Art Oxford’s final exhibition of 2016 is KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality. The exhibition brings together the work of artists who explore systems of display in art that reveal power dynamics at work in the reality of wider society.
 


Installation Views

Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford Installation image for KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality, at Modern Art Oxford

Modern Art Oxford’s final exhibition of 2016 is KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality. The exhibition brings together the work of artists who explore systems of display in art that reveal power dynamics at work in the reality of wider society.
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The artists, from different generations, present ways in which visual materials – images, objects and artworks – are mediated by the contexts in which they appear. The exhibition presents work by Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Iman Issa, Darcy Lange, Louise Lawler, Maria Loboda, Kerry James Marshall, Katja Novitskova and Hardeep Pandhal.

Working with photography, sculpture, painting, video and installation, these nine artists have each explored the relationship between the production of artwork and social, political, economic and cultural conditions in which it is created.
At the heart of the exhibition is a new work by Maria Loboda, commissioned for The Vanished Reality. A vast circle covered in bamboo stands vertically in the centre of the gallery, inviting visitors to cross its threshold. Inspired by the chinowa, a passageway which appears at Shinto shrines in Japan, Loboda’s work plays on the quasi-religious atmospheres often associated with gallery spaces.

Returning to Modern Art Oxford after almost 40 years are works by the acclaimed artists Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke. Broodthaers plays a central role in The Vanished Reality, in which works from his 1975 Modern Art Oxford exhibition are presented alongside Loboda’s sculpture. Originally created at Modern Art Oxford at the invitation of Nicholas Serota, director of the gallery between 1973 and 1976, Broodthaers’ photographs draw attention to the process of codifying artworks that takes place as soon objects are displayed in a gallery.

A Breed Apart, a series of seven photo collages by Hans Haacke, were created for his exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 1978. Haacke began researching connections between British Leyland, then Oxford’s largest employer, and the Apartheid government in South Africa, to whom the company was supplying military vehicles. The resulting works, which are both ironic and intensely political, were directly addressed to the Oxford community and are indicative of Haacke’s ongoing critique of the connections between art, politics and economic power.

Iman Issa’s works are drawn from a series entitled Heritage Studies, in which she adopts and abstracts forms of objects she has viewed in museum collections around the world. The sculptures presented here are displayed alongside museum-style labels written by Issa, highlighting the ways in which institutions construct and present knowledge - curatorial texts often appear as objective statements of fact, when they offer singular and sometimes highly subjective views.

This is the concluding exhibition in a year of interconnected shows, which has brought together the work of international artists spanning the last 50 years who examine subjects from perceptions of time to globalisation, consumerism to cultural identities, and memory, intimacy and endurance, as well as revisiting Oxford’s own history.

Photography: Ben Westoby

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