A Void


Curated by Paul Ramírez Jonas
September 22 - November 18, 2018
601 Artspace, NYC

Emily Jacir
Shaun Leonardo
Suzanne Lacy
Oscar Muñoz
Georges Perec
Michael Rakowitz
Constanza Ramirez Molano
Jonathan Safran Foer
Aida Šehović

A Void gathers works from eight artists who have addressed the absences created by systemic violence against specific groups of people, and juxtaposes them with eight artworks that have been lost to war.

The exhibition is anchored around George Perec's 1969 novel “A Void”. This book was written without using the letter “e”, or as one would say in French "sans e”, which when read out loud sounds like "sans eux" –which translates to “without them”. “E” is the most common letter in the French language, and this writing constraint is considered a coded reference to the loss of Perec’s family to the Holocaust.