Lara Favaretto in Sharjah
Just Knocked Out. Modified version of her exhibition shown before at MoMA PS1, 15 December 2012 - 6 February 2013 at Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah.
For an optimal view of our website, please rotate your tablet horizontally.
Soil, brass, hidden metal box
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; and Klosterfelde, Berlin
Dedicated to a French gas worker named Albert Dadas (1860–1907), who lived in Bordeaux at the end of the nineteenth century, but who travelled far from home. Dadas suffered from dromomania, or ‘wandering fugue’, which would cause him to fall into a trance-like state and desert his job and family to travel obsessively, usually on foot. He would regularly find himself destitute and imprisoned in distant cities without having understood quite how he arrived there. Dadas’s doctor diagnosed him with ‘pathological tourism’; while his destinations varied, his walking was a means of travelling away from himself and his life.
In memory of this man—whose greatest passions occurred mostly in a state of unconsciousness, hidden from himself—Favaretto has constructed an obscuring landscape that recalls a cemetery rather than a swamp. Concealed beneath the earthen floor, a secret object lies entombed within a metal box, known only to the artist.
(From the catalog)
© Photo: Haupt & Binder
Just Knocked Out. Modified version of her exhibition shown before at MoMA PS1, 15 December 2012 - 6 February 2013 at Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah.