
Nicholas Byrne, Abraded Double, 2011
I was leafing through a very old book one day and came across it as the Spanish-to-English translation of the title an engraving from Francisco Goya’s ‘Prisoner of War’ series. Plate number 35. It’s a rather beautifully faithful, but idiomatic translation into English — for what should be something closer to, ‘It is impossible to know why.’ There was something about the creative fidelity, the liberty with which it was translated, that immediately struck me as something that could resonate with the line of thinking I’d hoped to develop for the show. I ran it past a couple of the artists, and it stuck. As an expression of hopelessness at arriving at a reasoning or explanation, it fit with the inexplicit nature of the show’s theme.
An important part of the exhibition is a publication compiled from “new and republished texts by Josef Strau, letters (exchanged between the curator and the artists) as well as passages of literature.”
The idea for the publication came from my interest in drawing together material exchanged during the creation of the show as a way to demonstrate the interrelations as well as the shared interests between the artists and those drawing the exhibition together, in a less explicit way than a press release would. I wanted to make it a very modest parallel production, a little bit rough around the edges where it could be — something that might feel like a journal or scrapbook that came together during the making of things; and that could somehow be reflective of the creative process.