Plague and Protest
At the center of the cabinet exhibition “Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston – Plague and Protest” are two color woodcuts from the 18-part series “Doomscrolling” (2021) by the two New York-based artists Zorawar Sidhu (* 1985) and Rob, exhibited for the first time in the Kupferstichkabinett Swainston (born 1970).
Image gallery
Rob Swainston, Zorawar Sidhu, May 24, Detail, aus der Serie Doomscrolling, 2021, Farbholzschnitt
Rob Swainston, Zorawar Sidhu, May 28, Detail, aus der Serie Doomscrolling, 2021, Farbholzschnitt
In this series, Sidhu and Swainston processed drastic events that occurred in the USA between May 24, 2020 and January 6, 2021:
the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of George Perry Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement and the insurrection outside and at the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. With the woodcuts, Sidhu and Swainston created colorful images of events and history from the early 21st century.
Although Swainston and Sidhu chose the oldest print medium, woodcut, for their series of images, their images are no less contemporary.
Material, form and history come together in a unique way in “Doomscrolling”: it reflects protest and uprising, pandemic and isolation, the spread of news through the media, whether digital or analogue, and their consumption, which on the one hand informs and on the other hand creates new dependencies and creates illnesses.
The term “doomscrolling” describes the phenomenon of excessive reception of largely negative and frightening news and its harmful consequences: pathogenic psycho-physiological reactions and compulsive addictive behavior.
Wood as a store of history
As printing blocks, Sidhu and Swainston used wooden panels that had previously been used to protect the facade of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York during the riots that followed the murder of African-American George Perry Floyd (1973-2020) by a white police officer in Minneapolis, USA. State of Minnesota on May 25, 2020.
Rob Swainston described his impressions from New York: “Suddenly the plywood panels were pulled up and I saw in the wooden panels that covered Manhattan the potential to cut into the events of 2020.”
Images of plague and protest across epochs
In the woodcuts of “Doomscrolling,” Swainston and Sihu processed images from 2020, which they either took with their own cameras in New York or researched on the Internet, with motifs from graphics from past centuries. These include prints by Albrecht Dürer, Romeyn de Hooghe and Käthe Kollwitz.
This epoch-spanning approach is continued in the copper engraving cabinet presentation. In addition to the two contemporary woodcuts, there are also 16 prints and drawings from the 16th to 20th centuries with motifs of pandemics and uprisings on display, including the copperplate engraving “Il Morbetto” (The Plague, around 1515/16) by Marcantonio Raimondi and the Etching “The Plague” (1903) by Max Klinger, “The Barricade” (1871) by Edouard Manet, the etching “Rebellion” (1899) by Käthe Kollwitz and the pen drawing “Strike meeting of the miners in Charleroi” (1912) by Sella Hasse.
Artists in the exhibition:
Jean Baron after Nicolas Poussin, Honoré Daumier, Käthe Kollwitz, Sella Hasse, Max Klinger, Jan Luyken, Georg Mack the Elder, Edouard Manet, Master of the Miracles of Mariazell, Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston.
“Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston – Plague and Protest” is curated by Jenny Graser, curator of contemporary art at the Kupferstichkabinett.
A special exhibition of the copper engraving cabinet in the picture gallery of the Berlin State Museums
