57th October Salon
THE MARVELLOUS CACOPHONY
IX 15 - X 28 2018
Autors Team
Gunnar B. Kvaran was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1955. He received a P.H.D. in Art History from l'Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France in 1986. Kvaran, was director of the Reykjavik Art Museum between 1989-1997, and from 1997 to 2001 was Director of the Bergen Art Museum, Norway. He has been Director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway since 2001. Kvaran was Curator for the Lyon Biennale in 2013 and Co-curator for the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2007. Recently, he curated the exhibitions "EUROPE, EUROPE: the European emerging art scene part 1" (with Thomas Boutoux and Hans Ulrich Obrist); "Cindy Sherman: Untitled Horrors" (together with Daniel Birnbaum); "To be with Art is all we ask, In the Name of the Artists: American contemporary art from the Astrup Fearnley collection"; "Indian Highway" (co-curated together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones); "Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol", and "China Power Station" (co-curated together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones).
Danielle Kvaran was born in Marseille in 1956. After studying classics, she taught French language and literature at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. Since 2008, she has been curator of the Erró collection at the Reykjavik Art Museum, where she has curated exhibitions such as "Erró, Portraits" (2009), "Erró, Drawings" (2011), "Erró, Prints" (2012), "The Making of Erró: 1955–64" (2015), and "Erró: More is beautiful" (2017). In 2014 she was guest curator for the Erró retrospective at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Lyon. She was consulted as an expert for the exhibition of collages by Erró at the drawing department of the Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris, in 2010, and for the exhibition "Erró, Portraits and Landscapes" at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2011. As author, she has contributed to several catalogues and published various books about the artist, among them Erró Chronology, his life and art (2007) – the monograph of reference. She was co-editor of the catalogue for the Lyon Biennale 2013.
We have decided to present an exhibition entitled The Marvellous Cacophony, based on the idea of diversity. This concept puts the Serbian and the Belgrade art scenes into an international context, but at the same time, refers to the complex cultural and socio-political situation in the region. At the beginning of 21st century, despite the fact that the Western notion of contemporary art has become an universal model of reference, no single common denominator has emerged. The art world has many centres, multi-layered activities, a plurality of ideas about what art is and what it can be, and an impressive number of heterogeneous works. This Marvellous Cacophony reflects the richness of the world. It is a positive condition, creating energies that can include dissonance and even conflicting ideas and expressions. It involves the coexistence of multiple identities and permanent relational flows, conveying notions of miscellany and openness, and creating meaningful narratives about art and culture, social issues and politics. The Marvellous Cacophony will explore worldwide artistic production, looking into diverse art scenes and different generations of living artists. It will bring together a constellation of works that express, through their forms, structures, materials, techniques, devices and content, the extraordinary richness of contemporary artistic expression.Danielle and Gunnar B. Kvaran