Almagestes

16⁠–⁠​17.03.2013

The group show Almagestes brings together artists, designers, theoreticians, and art critics who were invited to exhibit a list of works from their personal library.

While avoiding the possible pitfall of anthologies made up of favorite books, each of the lists explores various forms of declaration and utterance, running from the obvious gesture to the monomaniacal collection, not to mention arrangements whose lucky randomness patches together ideas that are diametrically opposed. Like composite portraits, each list raises as many points of view on the practices of the invited participants as multilayered discourses that remain to be reconstructed.

In a gesture similar to the principle behind the birth of this project, the show borrows its title from Almagestes, the first literary work by the French philosopher Alain Badiou. The book presents the tribulations of a range of characters caught up in a plurality of possible worlds from which they try to construct their own language.

A library seems like a promise that, beyond the reified, patiently gleaned and listed pieces of information and bits of knowledge, heralds above all actions humanity will be capable of in the future.