Caritas
Stories, Parables and Dreams
Exhibition/tour itinerary 10 October 2014-18 January 2015
Starting from the Musée de Picardie and taking in a series of venues across Amiens, selected for their symbolic value in terms of power, justice, knowledge and sharing, the Caritas exhibition is designed as a journey in time and space, a round trip between past and present.
Saint Martin’s sharing of his cloak at the gates of Amiens – the “Charity of Amiens” – serves as the exhibition’s departure point. The two rooms on the first floor evoke the age-old injunction to charity via works reflecting episodes from Christian and antique tradition, with scenography combining art objects, classical works, quotations and extracts from poems.
The theme of sharing is continued through the museum’s other areas, with two contemporary art works that question our condition as onlooker, whether active or passive, in the reception of the works and stories provided to help us understand our modern world.
Exhibition visitors are then invited to leave the museum and go by way of one of the city’s churches, its law courts, the local newspaper’s offices, the Art School’s gallery, a bank’s head office and the future university, to finish up in the city’s northernmost neighbourhoods, where new issues of differences and sharing are at play. These history-steeped stop-offs have been turned into venues for installations, sculptures and videos all referring back to the legend of Saint Martin.
The multifaceted evocative appeal of this constellation of works and places leads us to ponder the exhibition’s theme as well as the museum’s ability today to act as a space for the sharing of knowledge with its visitors – a space open to the world at large.
Exhibition catalogue to be published in November 2014, 92 pp. Ed. Musée de Picardie.
Exhibition curators: Barry Barker, Peter Seddon, Sabine Cazenave and Sophie Fauvel.
