Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

Artists: Erik Bulatov, Ida Lennartsson, gerlach en koop, Raqs Media Collective, and Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck & Media Farzin

Curated by David Upton 

Project Arts Centre is proud to present Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, an international group exhibition that draws from the journey of 24 Orthodox icons which came to be housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.

British writer and war correspondent, WED Allen, purchased these icons in Istanbul in the early 1920s during the fallout of the Greco-Turkish war, a time of massive population and cultural displacement following World War One and the Russian Revolution. For several years afterwards, the Grand Bazaar was full of the debris of these times including many Religious icons, often regarded as cult images believed to have properties of healing, consoling or otherwise conveying a miraculous effect. Purchased from Allen in 1968 by the National Gallery of Ireland these icons remained in storage until 2011 until five of them underwent conservation work and joined the Masterpieces of the Collection. The exhibition draws from their story: the impossibility of the icons ever returning to their place of origin or resuming their original function, the dissolution of their countries’ borders and names and their disconnection from communities that have long since dispersed.

“Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is a sentence Noam Chomsky used in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures to illustrate that a sentence could be grammatically correct while semantically nonsensical. In the context of this exhibition, it alludes to the rise of the post-truth political landscape spurred on by the 24-hour a day media and populist political forces. It seeks to identify and value the complexity of our shared narratives and, through empathy, resist the trend to reduce them into tools of fear and control.

Curated by David Upton
Commissioned by Tessa Giblin
Admission to the visual arts at Project Arts Centre is always free

Project Arts Centre is proud to support Jesse Jones at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Find out more about Tremble Tremble here.