SUSAN PHILIPSZ
Jarla Partilager
I SEE A DARKNESS
Jarla Partilager, Stockholm 2008
SUSAN PHILIPSZ
Intr oduction
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I SEE A DARKNESS
Susan Philipsz
‘She was the light giver, the patron saint of eyesight, and the guide through dark places.’ 1 The exhibition I See a Darkness is a project conceived specifically for Jarla Partilager. When I went to Stockholm initially to talk about the show we decided to schedule the exhibition in December to coincide with the Santa Lucia festival that is celebrated all over Sweden. The festival takes place on one of the darkest days in the calendar and celebrates the coming of the light. I’d heard about this famous festival and I knew that the Swedes had adopted the Neapolitan song Santa Lucia as their own. I was interested in this as it was a song I knew from childhood, a song about a sailor who longs to return home. This song somehow always stayed with me. On a visit to Italy earlier in the year I visited Naples and looking out onto the Bay of Naples I remembered that the song refers to the district in Naples called the Borgo Santa Lucia and I began to realise the potential of the song again. 4
Grand Hotel Santa Lucia, Naples
The Bay of Naples
I See a Darkness
On my way to Naples I stopped in Rome where I came across a book about James Joyce’s daughter Lucia Joyce. This was to become my book for the journey. I was surprised to discover that she was very important in Joyce’s development as a writer and that he frequently refers to her in his work. She was to become his muse and was always under his watchful eye. Lucia took after her father; she loved to dance as much as Joyce loved to sing and it seemed that she was destined for great things. However, the more I read about Lucia Joyce the more I began to realise what a tragedy her life was. Lucia Joyce found that her own needs were to be sacrificed for the sake of her father’s work. The family moved continually and in doing so uprooted Lucia’s sense of herself. Joyce recognised and acknowledged this towards the end of his life but by that time there was nothing he could do about it except try to make up for it in the realm of fantasy in the closing moments of Finnegans Wake. Lucia Joyce 7
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slipped into madness and obscurity and lived the remainder of her years isolated in an institution in Northampton, England. Santa Lucia came from Siracuse in Sicily. She has always been described as having beautiful eyes. Lucia Joyce, however, inherited her eyes from her mother’s side of the family. Nora Barnacle’s sister Peg had a strong cast in one eye. This eye defect was something Lucia Joyce was always self - c onscious of throughout her life. Santa Lucia forsake all male attention during her life in order to devote herself to God, so much, so legend has it, that after one admirer complimented her eyes she cut them out and sent them to him. Like Santa Lucia, Lucia Joyce was always to remain single. After a failed love affair with Samuel Beckett, he reputedly based his character ‘The Syra Cusa’ upon Lucia Joyce. Lucia Joyce’s relationships were always thwarted by her closeness to her father, she remained in his shadow throughout her life. Santa Lucia will always represent light. However, Lucia 8
I See a Darkness
Joyce’s story is one of a bright light slipping into obscurity and darkness. I have arranged a series of portraits of Lucia Joyce and Santa Lucia in this publication in the form of traditional image plates that you might find in an old catalogue. The portraits are mixed in a chronology that moves from early years through adolescence and adulthood and on to death and martyrdom, as if both characters could have shared one life. In the exhibition space a disembodied voice coming from the darkness might allude to the forgotten Lucia, light giver and guide in dark places.
1) Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, Picador, New York 2003, p.37
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I SEE A DARKNESS
PLATES
Lucia Joyce as a young girl, wearing hat with streamers, Zurich, circa 1914 Courtesy of the Poetry Collection, The State University of New York at Buffalo
Lucia with Nora and Giorgio Joyce, Zurich, circa 1916 Courtesy of the Poetry Collection, The State University of New York at Buffalo
The Joyce family dining at a restaurant, Zurich, date unknown Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Lucia Joyce on balcony, date unknown Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Santa Lucia, circa 1670, Carlo Dolci Courtesy of the Polo Museale della cittĂ di Firenze
Lucia Joyce seated at table, Ostend, 1924 Courtesy of the Poetry Collection, The State University of New York at Buffalo
Santa Lucia, 1521, Domenico di Pace Beccafumi Courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i beni Storici Artistici di Siena e Grosseto
Lucia Joyce, Paris, 1924 Š Berenice Abbott /Commerce Graphics, NYC. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Santa Lucia and the story of her life, 1461–1478, Quirizio da Murano Courtesy of the Pinacoteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo
James and Lucia Joyce, date unknown Courtesy of the Poetry Collection, The State University of New York at Buffalo
Santa Lucia, 17 th century, anonymous Courtesy of the Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo, Siracuse
Lucia Joyce, date unknown Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Santa Lucia, 17 th century, anonymous Courtesy of the Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo, Siracuse
Lucia Joyce (second from the right) with Les Six de Rythme et Couleur, Vence, circa 1927 Courtesy of the Eugene and Maria Jolas Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Santa Lucia, 1473, Francesco del Cossa Courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Lucia Joyce’s passport photograph, circa 1932 Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Santa Lucia and Agata, 16 th–18 th century, anonymous Courtesy of the Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo, Siracuse
The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Santa Lucia, circa 1582, Paolo Veronese Courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Santa Agata appears to Santa Lucia tormented, circa 1625–1640, Peter Paul Rubens Courtesy of the Accademia Carrara - Galleria d’Arte moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo
Burial of Santa Lucia, 1608–1609, Caravaggio Courtesy of the church of Santa Lucia al sepolcro, Siracuse
DIETER ROELSTRAETE Essay
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SUSAN
Dieter Roelstraete
James James Joyce, one of a handful of writers whose protean greatness acquired even more luster as their daily lives grew increasingly dark through failing eyesight — John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jorge Luis Borges are his most illustrious companions, all descendants of the mythic father of eyeless storytelling, Homer — apparently named his daughter Lucia Anna Joyce after Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind; born on July 26th, 1907 (the feast of Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary), Lucia Joyce was only ten months old when her father, whose ‘nearsightedness had become part of his personality’ since age 16 1, suffered his first severe attack of iritis — the dramatic first stage of his gradual descent into the abyss of near - blindness. The fabled proverbial light of her father’s life, Lucia herself suffered from eye - problems (a severe case of strabismus, to be more exact), and the tragic course of her own troubled existence has cast her into 58
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a dark pit of family shame — she died a lonely schizophrenic (diagnosed as such by none other than Carl Jung) in St. Andrew’s Psychiatric Hospital in Northampton on December 12 th, 1982, exactly one day before the feast of Saint Lucy. 2 Lucy Sainthood apart, a venerable tradition has long wed blindness to philosophy, and identified the exile into its darkness, whether self - imposed or not (this is an important distinction, with great consequences for the moral claims and virtues of the philosophy in question), as the supreme path to the divine gift of Wisdom — that of a higher, different order of ‘Enlightenment’. This cultural idealization of blindness, of the inner light that is supposed to shine in the pitch dark of visual sensory deprivation, is of course inextricably linked to one of the founding myths of the Western metaphysical tradition, which, ever since its defining formulation in 59
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the works of Plato, has sought to convince us of the fundamental falsity of the world as revealed to us by sight, by visual stimuli. Classical philosophy’s deep distrust of the here and now, of the world of lived experience and immediate, empirically ascertained phenomena (‘physics’), and its consequent glorification of all that is transcendental and meta - p hysical, immutable and eternal, has resulted in a long history of programmatic denigration of the one sense which, paradoxically, is perhaps most highly regarded (no pun intended!) in Western culture in general, namely vision. [This ambivalence is best expressed by the fact that, no matter how great their principled disdain for a world transmitted to us by way of direct visual information, very few philosophers — certainly none of the ‘great’ ones, a marked difference from the world of literature — were actually blind. This actual resistance to blindness, the allegorical figure of which is so often carelessly and casually invoked, not to say romanticized, 60
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in much philosophical writing, may be related to the structural relationship between sight and writing, the incarnation of language much favored by philosophy over its elusive, spectral embodiment in speech. Perhaps philosophy needs vision only for reading — rather than seeing — for deciphering ‘the prose of the world’.] Echoing the basic assumptions of this anti - visual metaphysical tradition, the ideali– zation of blindness (or rather: of not - s eeing, of distrusting and closing one’s eyes) as the true path to wisdom, towards the higher in - s ight of non - sight, also has deep roots in religious doxas and habits of thought, many of which in fact predate the philosophical romance of the dark. Nocturnal mystique — that of the so - c alled ‘witching hour’ — and the archaic association of sun and moon with a supernatural regime of (simultaneously life - giving and death - b ringing) being have long provided dependable sources for such a ‘theology’ of darkness. And speaking of the sun, whose preciousness 61
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and periodical scarcity is invoked with such moving effect on Saint Lucy’s Day: it is only a small step from the willing acceptance of the radiant light of the midday sun as a tell - t ale sign of divine presence — that time of day ‘when things no longer cast shadows’, and Zarathustra roams an Earth of stark desolation — to the desire for blindness as a privileged form of, or possibility for, communion with the divine. The state of blindness acquired after staring into the sun for too long will guide the saint (as well as the selfless scientist 3) towards a new, higher level of intimacy with the divine source of this life - giving light — a ‘place’ where the humdrum bustle of visual stimuli no longer provides any distraction, and where the power of vision can no longer compete with the divine claims for immersion and wholeness. Under these conditions, sub specie aeternitatis, blindness has long been considered a godly gift, and there exists a long and hallowed tradition of mystical practices related to the ecstatic relishing 62
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of this gift — the sublime assurance of God’s never - ending night. Postnik In My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk describes the intricate web of intrigue, rivalries and shifting allegiances that holds together a tight community of miniature painters in sixteenth - c entury Ottoman Istanbul. There as well, blindness is a recurring theme — as a gift (yet again) of God granted only the most devoted and tireless of miniaturists, those who spend their whole lives stooped over manuscripts, serenely perfecting the art of writing God’s thousand - a nd - o ne names in the leaves of olive trees, the hair of desert princesses or the manes of mountain lions, losing their eyesight in the process for the sheer sacrificial love of God. Some of these miniaturists willingly cast themselves in the blessed darkness and infinite bliss of their blindness (their weapon of choice very often the tool of their cruel trade — a pencil or paint brush) ‘in order to keep for 63
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ever in their memory the vision of God’s world as Allah first saw it, freshly created; or because they do not wish to be able to see anything after looking at the Book of Kings; or to avoid being forced to fulfill orders received from the new masters of Herat to paint in a different style from the one they are accustomed to.’ Some, no doubt, were forcibly blinded by their rancorous and jealous masters, to ensure that they would never repeat or (Allah forbid) better the calligraphic feats accomplished under these sovereigns — a practice with a troubling degree of currency, it appears, in the barbaric plains of an imagined East: Postnik Yakovlev (who?) is best remembered today as the architect of Moscow’s iconic Saint Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, built in the middle of the fifteenth century — under the rule, that is, of Ivan the Terrible, who ordered Yakovlev blinded immediately after the cathedral’s completion, thus ensuring that he would never build anything as beautiful again. Perhaps this is where we can locate the historical 64
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source for the awful blinding scene in Andrei Tarkovski’s Andrei Rublev, in which a troupe of Rublev’s fellow icon painters and muralists have their eyes gouged out to prevent them from working for their former employer’s estranged brother. [Anyone who has ever entered the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin — and there are obviously many more churches like it in the Orthodox world — will intuitively understand the exceptional status ascribed to icon painters, and to holy imagery in general, in Greek and Russian Orthodoxy. The interior, which is much darker than what we in the West assume a house of prayer ‘must’ be — in the Protestant tradition especially the house of God must ‘show’ him to be the source of all the world’s light: all darkness is resolutely labeled diabolical — is entirely covered with images, ensuring one’s entry into this space becomes a delirious, hallucinogenic experience. Orthodox religious spaces are also much more multi - sensorial than their ‘Western’ counterparts 65
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— they are filled with the pungent odor of incense and with the rumbling bass of liturgical chant, and the veneration of its icons is no mere contemplative affair, as long lines of worshippers queue up to kiss the holy images of its patron saints.] The triangular connection between blindness/darkness, light and art will appear again in Russian history much later, in the years of feverish artistic and intellectual activity that led up to the October Revolution of 1917: in 1913, Kazimir Malevich not only painted the first of a series of Black Squares (framed in shining white haloes, and famously first exhibited exactly like the icons of old), but also co - a uthored the futuro - cubist avant - g arde opera Victory over the Sun, a play in which the figure of the sun represents mundane, everyday (‘practical’) reason or rationality, the main obstacle blocking mankind’s path towards a different, higher kind of Enlightenment, towards true transcendence — but what else can such a ‘victory over the sun’ mean than complete and utter darkness? 66
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That which, precisely, was achieved during the Dark Ages of Stalinization that soon followed Malevich’s revolution… Joseph Perhaps the greatest painter of the Age of Enlightenment (an era not usually remembered for its excellence in painting: visual art and Enlightenment thought never really saw eye to eye that much 4) is a relatively little - k nown artist by the name of Joseph Wright, most of whose masterful paintings are now owned by the Derby City Council — one spectacular exception being his An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump from 1768, on view at the National Gallery in London. I first saw this painting reprinted on a book jacket; the book was titled The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader, and I bought it in Athens in the hot summer of 2007 to help me weave my way through an art event organized in conjunction with the first Athens Biennial, devoted to — in the optimistic rhetoric of the 67
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project — ‘untangling the Gordian knot of the Enlightenment legacy’ (we never did, never managed — even though Susan Philipsz was part of that project). Wright’s grandiose painting shows the artist’s mastery of chiaroscuro at its dramatic best: a crowd of people, some willing, others clearly refusing the Enlightenment, gather around an experiment by a natural scientist — the only one to directly address the viewer with his gaze, apart from a worried - l ooking boy (his assistant, who is just carrying off the eponymous bird’s cage) to the right — in which a white dove is locked inside a glass tube ready to be vacuum - sucked. To the left of the slightly deranged - looking, long - h aired professor a number of young adults look on approvingly, united in their understanding that this is most probably the way of the future. To the right, two young children — one averting its eyes, the other one teary - eyed, looking up at the dove’s frantic last gasps of air — are not so 68
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ © The National Gallery, London
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excited by the spectacle of scientific modernity descending among their midst; an older man is trying to comfort them, his index finger held aloft in authoritarian disregard for the tragic rift between feeling and knowing which the children see (or rather, feel ) open up beneath their feet. In the far right corner, a brooding figure huddles in the near - dark; a philosopher, most probably, gloomily looking ahead, contemplating the sinister force of the fire that lights up the whole scene, but simultaneously also heralds the death — obviously useless, when considered in the greater scheme of things — of one of God’s creatures (and the one most often identified with the Holy Spirit at that). Predating the publication of Immanuel Kant’s landmark essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment ?’ by some sixteen years, and predating the French Revolution by another five, Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump already seems to encapsulate, in that great wordless way that great art does 70
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so well, both the triumph and tragedy of that historical event that we call the Enlightenment — and it does so in a most illuminating, literal sense, i.e. in a literal play on the grand painterly tradition of the clair - obscur. [Chiaroscuro technique was more or less on its way out by the end of the eighteenth century, incidentally — its fate probably wasn’t helped much by its association with the Catholic mysticism of Caravaggio and the like.] The darkness that envelops the scientist’s ‘laboratory’, most probably a salon or reading room, seems to reflect (or rather, absorb) the darkness of Man’s incarceration in centuries of — partly self - willed — ignorance. Locked inside this dungeon with only the shackles of authority, habit and, most importantly, tradition to keep him company, Man essentially remains a slave — a mindless cog in the machine of the medieval worldview. In a figure of speech that clearly invokes the apocalyptic spirit of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, however, Immanuel Kant ventured 71
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that ‘enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self - imposed immaturity. [Kant uses the German word Unmündigkeit here, literally the age - related inability to speak, a paraphrase of the Latin infans, ed.] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self - i mposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” — that is the motto of enlightenment.’ 5 And thus — fiat lux! Let there be light! And light there is, in Wright’s painting — but at a troubling, if not terrible price, that of death rather than mere disenchantment. An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump portrays the defining inaugural event of the Enlightenment — the revolutionary intuition that we can know and understand the world, that we can unravel its mystery and bare the relatively straightforward mechanics that lie at its heart - of - darkness — as something quite 72
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different from a triumphant Journey into the Light festively welcomed by all, an ambivalence felt most acutely of all by the children (the in - fantes) in the painting. Its light, however modest and archaic (a flame!), appears as the bringer of death, making the nocturnal realm of shadows seem a benign shelter in comparison, reminding us of the age - old metaphor of the murky yet comforting darkness of the primeval maternal cavity — to which the children in the painting are closest. The allegorical depiction of light in this painting is far removed, in other words, from the idealist dream of a New Dawn that was invoked with such tireless insistence throughout much of the late eighteenth century. Joseph Wright’s light is hostile and life - t hreatening instead, not unlike the cold, thin mountain air described by Nietzsche in the delirious opening pages of Ecce Homo — his infamous, final farewell to the crippling constraints of reason, written down when the last bright rays of sanity set over the scorched earth of the Nietzschean mindscape, 73
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escorting him back to the dark night of non - thought: ‘He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible — but how peacefully all things lie in the light!’6 Ingmar Let us finally go back to Sweden — and to music, if not song. Music in Darkness is the title of the fourth film by the great Swedish film auteur Ingmar Bergman; filmed in 1948, it clearly demonstrates the young director’s formative debt to the ground - breaking aesthetics of German expressionist cinema — the quintessential art of light versus dark (in which light is not necessarily always pictured as a force for the good). Music in Darkness tells the story of a talented young musician who loses his eyesight after an accident during his military service, and, upon return to the home of his upper - class parents, gradually 74
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falls in love with the lower - class servant girl who works there. The once formidable obstacle of class difference is further eroded when the blind pianist is refused a place at the music academy, and thereafter forced to make a living playing tunes in restaurants and bars (I don’t remember whether Sicilian tarantellas figure among them) — a depressing story, in short, of degradation, exploitation and eventual redemption that sets up all the standard philosophical motifs and tropes of Bergman’s later existentialism. Music really is its lone guiding light — like the songs we sing to people the dark labyrinth, alternately comforting and terrifying, of our childhood. Notes 1 ) See Richard Ellman, James Joyce, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p.64. 2 ) Saint Lucy’s memorial day coincides with winter solstice, the shortest day (or, alternately, longest night) of the year according to the ancient Julian calendar; it is one of only a handful of religious holidays still observed throughout the Scandinavian countries, where winter and summer solstices obviously have a far greater impact than further south — than in Siracuse, say, the birthplace of Santa Lucia and the site of her martyrdom: an early Christian convert who had consecrated her virginity to God, Santa Lucia had her eyes gouged out prior to her execution by Emperor Diocletian’s persecution squads.
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3 ) The reference here is to Belgian proto - cinema pioneer Joseph Plateau, the mid - nineteenth - century inventor of a stroboscopic device that eventually led to the development of moving image technology. Plateau’s fascination with solar light effects was such that he finally lost his eyesight after gazing into the sun for too long (half a minute, it is said). The analogy between blindness and science returns in Richard Dawkins’ aptly titled popular classic of evolutionary biology The Blind Watchmaker from 1986, an allusion to the so - called ‘Watchmaker Analogy’ made famous by British theologist William Paley. In his 1802 classic Natural Theology, Paley argued that the ‘watch - like’ complexity of the living universe could only be explained by the existence of a divine ‘watchmaker’. Dawkins, however, ventures that ‘all appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics (…) It is the blind watchmaker.’ 4 ) This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given visual art’s deep implication in the history of traditional or institutionalized religious thought which the Enlightenment sought to dislodge. The one cultural form that did flower during the Enlightenment era, music, can easily be linked to both the abstract, metaphysical language of mathematics and the mystical tradition of an anti - visual, luminous transcendence — that is to say, music provided non - visual light in the period’s overall darkness. 5 ) Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in: Paul Hyland (ed.), The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader, Abingdon: Routledge, 2003, p. 53. 6 ) Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, London: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 34.
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Published by Coordinator Editor Authors Image research Graphic design Proof reading Printing Binding ISBN
Jarla Partilager Karlavägen 9, 114 24 Stockholm, Sweden Amelie Edlund Eoghan McTigue Susan Philipsz, Dieter Roelstraete Marta Lusena Research and Development Hans Olsson Jernströms Offset Carl Svanberg Bokbinderi 978 - 91 - 976351 - 4 -1
Image credits The Poetry Collection, The State University of New York at Buffalo; The Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Polo Museale della città di Firenze; Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo, Siracuse; Commerce Graphics, NYC; Pinacoteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo; Soprintendenza per i beni Storici Artistici di Siena e Grosseto; The National Gallery of Art, Washington; Accademia Carrara-Galleria d’Arte moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo; Church of Santa Lucia al sepolcro, Siracuse; The National Gallery, London. Acknowledgements Gerard De Geer, Tanya Bonakdar, Will Oldham, Isabella Bortolozzi, Carolyn Christov - B ekargiev, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Hermine Pagmar Hansson, Annika Ström, Michael Fullerton, Phil Collins, Bill Drummond, Maria Cruz, Isaac, Rudy, Jude, Eliot and Rosa.
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