If on a Trondheim’s night a traveler...

Tauba Auerbach / Marvin Gaye Chetwynd / Roberto Cuoghi / Berllinde De Bruyckere / Trisha Donnelly / Francesco Gennari / Zoe Leonard / Sharon  Lockhart / Sarah Lucas / David Medalla / Raymond Pettibon / Charles Ray / Wael Shawky / Cindy Sherman / Paul Thek / Rosemarie Trockel / Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Trondheim kunstmuseum is proud to present an exhibition of works from one of Europe’s most important collections of contemporary art, Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, shown at TKM for the first time in Norway.

With an impressive history of acquisitions, exhibitions and production of important works, Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has also played an important part in spreading knowledge of contemporary art through extensive loans. Selections from the collection have recently been shown at Macro in Rome and Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. For this exhibition, the curators and director at TKM have made a selection of about 30 works, to be shown at the museum until the end of 2017.

The exhibition’s title, If on a Trondheim Night a Traveller…, pays tribute to Turin-based writer Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter Night a Traveller from 1979. In the novel the protagonist ’the reader’ ten times begin to read ten different novels, leaving each one incomplete. Each of these beginnings reflects a different style and a different relationship to the world. The novel that contains them all, not only plunges the actual readers –us– into compelling naratives, but also reminds us how every book is born out of and sits in relation to others.

Similarly, the works in the exhibition at Trondheim kunstmuseum represent a variety of different techniques –photography, drawing, sculpture, film, painting, installation. Placed next to each other they enter into dialogues that span a number of approaches and perspectives in art since the 1970s, including feminism, postcolonial studies and psychoanalysis. Over an exhibition period of eight months the changing light and conditions, not only of the seasons but also of world events, will let the public enter on many different travels and narratives, of historical uncertainties and how we live, love and see ourselves, represented in the artworks from this important collection.