Anathemata (2021-2022)
Anathemata 9 October 2021 - 6 February 2022
Antonin Artaud, Martin Bladh, Pierre Guyotat, Paul-Alexandre Islas, David Jones, Sarah Kane, James Richards, Karolina Urbaniak Curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou Anathemata is a display that interrogates the tradition of epic poetry within a tetrad of 20th century avant-garde artists; David Jones, Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane and Pierre Guyotat. These four artists are presented alongside contemporary artists Martin Bladh, Paul-Alexandre Islas, James Richards and Karolina Urbaniak through a display of manuscripts, drawings and videos. The exhibition title is borrowed from David Jones’s eponymous poem published in 1952. A British poet and artist of Welsh descent, Jones is considered a leading figure within modernist poetry along with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. His poem, The Anathemata, investigates the importance of mythology within the history of humanity from a modernist perspective. Written in the aftermath of the Second World War and interweaving Welsh and English late medieval sources, it defends the importance of epic narratives, fables and myths against the desacralising effect of modernism. Considered Jones’ seminal work, The Anathemata narrates the thought processes of a cambrophile over the span of roughly seven seconds at an English Catholic Mass. Using Old, Middle and Early-Modern English, Welsh, and Latin, The Anathemata questions the importance of past mythology within human history – from the Iron Age in Cornwall and Tudor London to Penda’s Mercia and the Welsh “Otherworld” – in a highly allusive and nonlinear fashion. In this text, Jones also stresses the importance of the artist as an inventor and bearer of myths.
