02 - The Rag Pickers, Curated by Charlie Levine
Plot points: found images featuring artwork by Ivo Bisignano, Mandy Hudson, Anna Berry, Léon Spilliaert, Dieter Roth, Hanne Darboven, Martin Kippenberger & Yifat Gat
Exhibition: Stand4 Gallery, Brooklyn

Read the exhibition catalogue here. 

Framing the role of curator as storyteller, The Tale Tellers is a project that invites creative practitioners to tell a familiar story or narrative through a series of visual cues. 

For The Tale Tellers: The Rag Pickers, curator Charlie Levine re-tells a chapter, The Rag Pickers, from the book Walter Benjamin's Archive.  This chapter focuses on theorist Benjamin and how he stored and collected information he used as prompts for his writings on archives, reproduction and architecture. 

​For this exhibition Levine is taking The Tale Tellers process one step further than just visually reproducing plot points of the chapter. She is also asking us, the audience, to see the project's use of reproduced images and the loss of their ‘aura’ (a key theory of Walter Benjamin’s) as key to this storytelling process - how memories fade and uncanny associations linger upon images with the passing of time while their authentic quality deteriorates. 

This tale asks us to question what the role of the curator is in directing a narrative and how we, the reader, piece together memories through these visual ‘rags’?

Thanks to Sam Ros, John Ros and Jeannine Bardo