A Blind Man in His Garden
A POOL exhibition 
Curated by Kris Dittel and Emma Panza

On view: 15 June – 27 September 2015 
LUMA/Westbau Löwenbräukunst, Zurich

A Blind Man in His Garden is the fourth exhibition organized by POOL project, featuring works from the collections of Maja Hoffmann and Michael Ringier. 

How to deal with the impossibility of experiencing an artwork or constellation of artworks to its fullest? If our understanding of it is always fragmented, reduced to factual information, or a compressed image in a database, a newspaper, lessons learnt and forgotten, can we still allow our sensations and intuitions to take over our imagination?

A Blind Man in His Garden is an exhibition that emphasizes subjective narratives, and puts forward a reading of an artwork, or exhibition, based on personal associations, previous knowledge and encounters. The title of the exhibition also refers to Joel Sternfeld’s photograph, A Blind Man in His Garden, Homer, Alaska, which suggests that there is a potential of artworks to trigger single or multiple narratives.

Artists: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pawel Althamer, Danai Anesiadou, Richard Artschwager, Melchiorre Bega, Walead Beshty, Monica Bonvicini, Mark Bradford, Maurizio Cattelan, Valentin Carron, Spartacus Chetwynd, Silvie Defraoui, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Fischli/ Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Katharina Grosse, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Seth Price, De Rijke / De Rooij, Wilhelm Sasnal, Jim Shaw, Slavs and Tatars, Christopher Williams.

Curators

Kris Dittel (1983, Slovakia) is an independent curator based in the Netherlands. She holds an MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and an MA in Arts and Heritage from Maastricht University, the Netherlands. As Assistant Curator at the Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, she took part in the organisation of the exhibitions Martin Visser: collector, designer, free spirit and BACA Masterclass. As Associate Curator she realised the exhibition Nachtfahrt at Bonnefanten Roermond and part of BACA Projects in collaboration with the Jan van Eyck Academie. Until 2013 she was a Board Member and Curator of the self-organised art initiative B32 in Maastricht. In 2013, Dittel took part in the curatorial residency programme at Schloss Ringenberg, Germany, followed by de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam in 2014. Dittel lives between Amsterdam and Eindhoven, and works as a curator at Onomatopee Project Space. 

Emma Panza (1985, Italy) is an independent curator based in Amsterdam. Between 2008 and 2013 she initiated and coordinated Temporary Black Space, an artists' initiative focused on local artistic and social events in Bergamo (IT). In 2012 she joined Casco, Utrecht, as a research assistant, and she participated in de Appel Curatorial Programme 2013-2014 as part of the curatorial team of the project "Father Can't you see I'm Burning". She writes for Metropolis M and recently collaborated with BYU, a project by Kunstverein Amsterdam, with the events Date Nights: Game, War, Love. Currently she is interested in the blurring boundaries between art and curatorial practice seen from private contexts, personal relations and coincidences, through a performative perspective.
Panza pursued her MA in Art History in Venice, with a thesis on the inheritance of the International Situationism.

Mentor
Lorenzo Benedetti, Director and curator at de Appel arts centre