Postponed by 2 months due to coronavirus restrictions, Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition will open on June 8. The exhibition was extended until 13 February 2021 to accommodate the largest number of visitors.
Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition explores the creative world of Nick Cave, musician, writer and cultural icon. The exhibition itself is an art work because it gathers 300 objects collected and/or created by Nick Cave in the last 6 decades of her artistic and personal life through large installations. Created for the « Diamond black » This exhibition, of which Cave is co-commissioner and co-creator, is an anticonformist fusion that combines biography, autobiography and fiction and questions what defines and shapes our lives.
Nick Cave's work is available through various media and expression modes focused on narrative in different forms. Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition invites visitors to follow Cave's artistic evolution to better understand the fundamental themes that traverse his work, his working methods and the many inspirations that underlie them. Behind each work is an equally exciting artistic approach, which was not meant to become public. The exhibition reveals the most intimate part of Cave's creative universe and offers its own history.
Stranger Than Kindness (« Stranger than goodness ») traces Cave's journey: his childhood in the 1960s in Wangaratta, Australia, the chaotic years with his first bands, The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party, and finally his moves to Berlin and London. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, a collaborative project in continuous evolution, is a central element, from the creation of the band during the most obsessive period of Cave in Berlin, until the last album, Ghosteen (2019), generally quoted how their best opus. The exhibition reveals how Cave's life, music, archives and stories continue to mix, shape and inspire one another.
IN COLLABORATION WITH NICK CAVE
Stranger Than Kindness was designed in collaboration with Nick Cave to create a series of immersive installations that allow visitors to experience the thoughts and creative approach of an artist. It is a tangible and physical narrative, in which space and scenography become an extension of the many stories that make up Cave's life and writings.
When the Royal Library of Denmark contacted with this idea « Nick Cave exhibition »I didn't really want to get involved. I'm not a nostalgic person and I had something else to do than to get back into my old memories. But the library team was obviously composed of serious people, endowed with superb and contagious energy, and they convinced me. We have created an exhibition whose bold scope is, in my view, unprecedented. It anchors in the past and unfolds in an uncertain future. In the end, we managed to set up an extraordinarily detailed exhibition that describes the fragility and vulnerability of identity. I am very proud to be part of this unique and anticonformist exhibition — This story bursts, we called it « Stranger Than Kindness ». -Nick Cave
Stranger Than Kindness fait résonner les voix des commissaires de l’exposition et de l’artiste. L’étroite collaboration entre Cave et les commissaires a débouché sur une approche originale de l’exposition biographique, garante d’une expérience nouvelle permise par les ressources, les objets, la vie et les histoires de Nick Cave. C’est un mélange de biographie, d’autobiographie et de fiction, ancré dans une narration spatiale : une invitation dans l’univers de création mythique d’un artiste.
Christina Back, co-commissaire et créatrice, confie : «Je suis stupéfaite par la faculté de Nick à créer un récit spatial et visuel. C’est naturel pour lui de s’exprimer grâce à des images narratives construites, donc ma mission première a été de ne pas trop intervenir et de laisser l’expression artistique se manifester aussi clairement que possible ».
Janine Barrand, co-commissaire, explique : «Ça a vraiment été une expérience géniale de collaborer avec Nick et Christina pour réinventer la vie créative de Nick en créant ensemble des histoires et en revisitant cette collection de façon inédite et passionnante. Je suis sûre que les visiteurs de l’exposition vont être entièrement immergés dans les mondes changeants et merveilleux de Nick et dans sa démarche artistique qui n’a encore jamais été dévoilée ».
Cave a également composé et enregistré avec son collaborateur de longue date Warren Ellis une ambiance sonore pour les 800 mètres carrés de l’exposition, afin d’accompagner et de mettre en perspective la narration physique qui se déploie à travers les huit salles de l’exposition.
L’exposition contient également deux installations créées avec les artistes Iain Forsyth et Jane Pollard qui ont écrit et réalisé le film 20 000 jours sur Terre, nominé aux BAFTA, dont Nick Cave est le protagoniste principal.