Piecing Together the Order of Things

Loosely inspired by Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, this sale brings together a selection of artists who condense movements, references, ideas, needs and aspirations of the contemporary world. The Mnemosyne Atlas consists in 60 sheets with images that trace the survival of symbols and archetypes that migrate from antiquity. In it, Aby Warburg gathers all the objects of his research into a “mobile panel” device which is constantly mounted, dismounted, remounted. Just as the Mnemosyne, PTTOOT is conceived as an atlas of images that constitutes a work of reference for audiences and artists. It implies a worldview susceptible to putting itself back together again and again through the play of associations, changing the way we conceive the relationships of artworks between themselves and of all of them together facing historical development.

The sale has been designed to foster an understanding of some of the artists’ work and how their pieces can be considered from the point of view of an authentic method and even from a transverse – but not standardised – knowledge of the world. Piecing Together The Order of Things is likewise interested in “knowledge through montage” and the “spatial and temporal ‘migrations’ [Wanderungen]” of images — but also the migration of concepts, conversations, and practices that underpin their creation and reception as works of art. French philosopher Didi Huberman’s claims that the force of the atlas relies precisely in the idea that images, when assembled in a certain manner, offer us the opportunity to reinterpret the world.

By considering his argument, the layout of this sale abandons the standard 4-artworks-rows to showcase the art pieces in a net ramification display governed by an internal logic of images. The combination is made according to a key of imagination leap, repetitions, flippant typology of motifs, and visual similarity, providing different paths to read cultural codes. Piecing Together The Order of Things brings all of this together and offers it to the viewer, who is included and plays an essential role in the process of creating meanings.

Curated by Marco Galvan