Curiosity: Art & the Pleasures of Knowing

Curiosity is an ambiguous passion: the virtuous impulse behind the search for knowledge and at the same time a disreputable desire for novelty and strangeness. This exhibition, curated by Brian Dillon and organised in association with Cabinet magazine, concentrates on contemporary art's return to the intellectual and aesthetic freedom that emerged in seventeenth century art and science. Taking the cabinet of curiosities as its founding motif and through a combination of contemporary art and historical artefacts, Curiosity explores the pleasure that comes from the search for the wondrous and bizarre for their own sake and the contradictory nature of that pleasure.

Artists include: Agency, Salvatore Arancio, Anna Atkins, Sir Joseph Banks, Leopold Blaschka and Rudolph Blaschka, Corinne May Botz, Pablo Bronstein, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Gerard Byrne, Collection of Roger Caillois, Nina Canell, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Tacita Dean, John Dee, Albrecht Durer, Jimmie Durham, Gunda Forster, Aurelien Froment, Galileo Galilei, Philip Henry Gosse, Laurent Grasso, Thomas Grunfeld, Susan Hiller, Robert Hooke, Ferrante Imperato, Toril Johannessen, Nina Katchadourian, Elad Lassry, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaes Maes, Jeremy Millar, Matt Mullican, Jean Painleve, Katie Paterson, B. Picart, after Charles Le Brun, Francis Place, Aura Satz, Miroslav Tichy, J.M.W. Turner, Richard Wentworth

Tour:
Turner Contemporary, Margate
25 May – 15 September 2013

Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich
28 September 2013 - 5 January 2014

de Appel, Amsterdam
June - August 2014

Exhibition available February - May 2014.  For further information and to register your request please email Alison Maun alison.maun@southbankcentre.co.uk

Security Category A
 

Image credit:
Albrecht Durer, The Rhinoceros (1515)