Falling Fictions

 The publication and exhibition ‘Falling Fictions’ are the product of a collaboration between me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation with the London Metropolitan University and the Whitechapel Gallery as part of the Master’s degree in ‘Curating the Contemporary’. The three-strong student team – Amy E. Brown, Alejandro Alonso Diaz, and Rosie Snaith – have chosen the theme of metafiction as a strategy to approach the objects in the Olbricht Collection, as a fine line between reality and fiction, and to reveal the way they incarnate stories within stories.

‘Falling Fictions’ takes its shape from a commissioned text by artist and writer Francesco Pedraglio. In his story an object begins to fall. As it falls, it falls through thirteen Heavens and nine Underworlds before coming to rest, finally, on Earth. Throughout the process of falling, and in each layer, the object changes form, shifting to become something else, both physically and conceptually, gathering new meaning. The tale gradually picks up pace, reaching a crescendo akin to the collision an object might make on the floor of the exhibition room, where it lands fully-formed.

Participating Artists: Doug Aitken, Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, Bazon Brock, Al Chang, Hansjoachim Dietrich, Marcel Dzama, Slawomir Elsner, Claire Fontaine, Imi Giese , KH Hödicke, John Isaacs, Ragnar Kjartansson, André Kertész, Imi Knoebel, Bernd Lohaus, Konrad Lueg, David Ostrowski, Blinky Palermo, Francesco Pedraglio, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Diter Rot, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerhard Rühm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tomas Schmit, Gavin Turk, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Wewerka, Lambert Maria Wintersberger, WOLS and objects from the Wunderkammer