GROUP SHOW WITH KATHRYN ANDREWS
NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS. THE CIRCUS MOTIF IN CONTEMPORARY ART.
KUNSTMUSEUM THUN, THUN, SWITZERLAND
16 SEPTEMBER – 3 DECEMBER 2023
Images by David Aebi © courtesy of the Artist and Kunstmuseum Thun
The first circuses were held in the late eighteenth century, in permanent venues rather than the tents that would later become popular, mainly in London. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the circus would develop into a mass phenomenon and a fixed component of European urban life. The spectacles attracted many people from the arts, such as literature, fine arts, music, and film. Circus motifs were thus gradually taken up by Naturalist painters as well as the avant-garde and by art movements such as New Objectivity and Expressionism. Today, the circus as locus of sensual experiences and extremes may seem like a relic of bygone times. And yet contemporary artists still draw on its repertoire of motifs. With this international group exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Thun is presenting works by contemporary artists who address the theme of the circus, demonstrating that this type of spectacle offers an ideal metaphor on many levels for spotlighting current social conflicts, exposing instances of stigmatization, questioning prevailing power structures, and illuminating how humans relate to animals. The focus is on how, in both the circus with all its ambivalent aspects and our everyday world, staging and reality are closely intertwined. The circus can serve as a mirror of both our past and our present. The exhibition can be divided into the following themes: formal language, the figure of the clown, our treatment of animals, and magic versus reality.
Images by David Aebi © courtesy of the Artist and Kunstmuseum Thun
In the spatial installation Collapse, Kathryn Andrews takes up the circus tent as an iconographic element. The red-and-white-striped fabric, which can be read as a signal communicating joy, is in a fragile state here – even on the verge of collapse. Andrews’ work revolves around the study of cultural history and the (often overlooked) violence that accompanies it. In 2019, under the title Circus Empire, the artist developed a show with circus components in order to question the aesthetic output of colonial mechanisms. The circus tent it contained now reappears at the Kunstmuseum Thun as a minimalist sculpture. Along with historical photographs, this evocation of destruction and decay is juxtaposed here with more common associations accompanying the circus and its iconography.