Matérialisme Histérique — Exposition Collective — Poggi Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 18 → November 29, 2014

By capturing historical materials, art reflects and manufactures our relationship with History and stories; it relates and evades its own story, the history of art, but it also weaves and updates minor stories that were constantly infringing upon the dominating, ideological, great History. Artists counterfeit forms of historical discourse: imaginary archives, fantastic archaeology, subversive hagiographies, puppet museums for the ghost theatre are all examples of history at work in contemporary art.

The Histerical Materialism exhibition project proposes to examine this obsession with respect to the historical reality of artists, whose artistic proposals succeed in making “delusional world”, beginning with the discourse that structures it as the world, the account of its history. If historical materialism imposed the history of class struggle as the only model to interpret reality for the vast majority of Marxist thought, would the reverse side of the coin and below this confusion, be histerical materialism. Would its challenge for art be to destabilise the awareness gained of our historiographical orthodoxy?