With the participation of Valérie Smith (Curator and Professor at Barnard College, New York) and Noëllie Roussel (scholar and specialist in the work of Mike Kelley).
Created by Clément Dirié, Expology is a cycle of events focusing on emblematic exhibitions in the history of contemporary art. In 2021, the first season was devoted to the 1990s in France. In 2022, the second season was devoted to two landmark exhibitions from the 2010s: Cady Noland, MMK, Frankfurt-am-Main (2018), and Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, Wiels, Brussels, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, MMK, Frankfurt-am-Main (2010-2011).
This new event dwells on the exhibition The Uncanny, organized in 1993 by Mike Kelley (1954-2012) as part of the festival Sonsbeek ’93 (Netherlands). Thirty years later, this lecture will examine the genesis and impact of this legendary event, its updating and expansion in 2004 in Liverpool at the Tate Liverpool and in Vienna at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, also looking at Mike Kelley’s work as an exhibition curator. With The Uncanny, Mike Kelley definitively embedded Sigmund Freud’s notion of “disquieting strangeness”, realist, figurative sculpture, and the fetishism of memory and objects in the world of contemporary art.
Along with Valérie Smith, the Director of Sonsbeek ’93 who invited Mike Kelley to create The Uncanny, and other guests, including Noëllie Roussel, oral testimony and previously unpublished materials complete our understanding of this exhibition, at the same time that the Bourse de Commerce is hosting Ghost and Spirit, a retrospective of Kelley’s oeuvre, until 19 February 2024.
Clément Dirié
Art historian and critic, as well as a curator, Clément Dirié is the editorial director of JRP|Editions, a publishing house for which he has edited many volumes and DVDs on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century exhibitions. As a keen observer of contemporary artistic creation and the genealogies of contemporary art, Dirié has authored numerous essays on art and design, including Iris Clert. L’Astre ambigu de l’avant-garde (Hermann).
This event will be conducted in English with a simultaneous translation into French.
