‘Allegory of the Cave Painting’, a project by Extra City Kunsthal, takes the prehistoric Gwion Gwion paintings from Western Australia as mental model. Recent research has established that these paintings are alive, colonized by red bacteria and black fungi, ‘living pigments’ that maintain the chromatic vividness of the figures: the Gwion Gwion paintings are as much a product of prehistory as they are made now. The group exhibition, at Extra City (20.09 — 07.12.2014) and at Middelheim Museum (26.10.2014 — 29.03.2015), assembles modern and contemporary artworks in response to these paintings’ materiality, meaning and time. Accompanying the exhibition an extended reader is published:

‘Allegory of the Cave Painting’, ed. Mihnea Mircan, Vincent van Gerven Oei, Mousse Milan, 2015, English, 456 p., ISBN 978-88-6749-116-2, 26 euro

For sale at Extra City (during exhibition periods) or via Extra City’s online bookshop.

A reader with contributions by Haseeb Ahmed, Ignacio Chapela, Justin Clemens, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jonathan Dronsfield, Christopher Fynsk, Adam Staley Groves, Sean Gurd, Adam Jasper, Susanne Kriemann, Landings (Vivian Ziherl en Natasha Ginwala), Brenda Machosky, Alexander Nagel, Rosalind Nashashibi, Tom Nicholson, Jack Pettigrew, Raphaël Pirenne, Susan Schuppli, Lucy Steeds, Jonas Tinius, Marina Vishmidt, Christopher Witmore and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. The reader is published by Mousse Publishing and is kindly sponsored by Plan B Gallery, Cluj/Berlin.

Language English