John Graham Ballard’s literary technique influenced by Surrealism, his explicit or indirect references to artworks or artpractices and the relationships the author had with the british Pop artists attest that The Atrocity Exhibition has an affinity with the discipline of contemporary art.
The aim of this research project was to design the parameters of an exhibition dedicated to The Atrocity Exhibition. The student-researchers inquired into the status of exhibitions - such as documentary, historical or thematical – and into more recent experimental displays. They decided to conceive an exhibition that articulated documentary restitution and creation. The few selected documents were used to blur the notions of context and reference in order to echo with the ambiguous media criticism in Ballard's work.
The display structure created for the exhibition points towards devices as eclectic as contemporary commercial fairs, world’s fairs or the Independent Group’s Pavilions, in an elliptic and entropic gesture involving oblivion, decay, mutation and sedimentation.
A book gathers all the lectures by invited experts, the interventions by the professors and the results of the sudents’ research in the conception of this exhibition.
Main applicant
Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne
(ECAL)
Julien Fronsacq (project leader)
Andreas Hochuli (assistant)
Students of Master en Arts Visuels de l’ECAL
Partners
Circuit, centre d'art contemporain, Lausanne
Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains
Period
From February 2012 to February 2013
Publication
Atrocity Exhibition Archive Paradoxe
Déambulations dans La Foire aux atrocités
Published by ECAL with the support of HES-SO
Edited by Julien Fronsacq
Funded by the HES-SO (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland)
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