A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction and natural disasters to urban decay, domestic dirt and forensics.
The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Robert Filliou, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards and film clips.
Conceived by writer and curator David Campany, the exhibition takes as a starting point the 1920 photograph taken by American artist Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp’s work in progress The Large Glass (1915–23) deliberately left to gather dust in his New York studio. First published in André Breton’s seminal Surrealist journal, Littérature in 1922 and captioned as a ‘view from an aeroplane’ by Man Ray, the photograph went on to appear in various journals, books and magazines, cropped and contextualized differently each time, before the image was formally titled Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) (1920) in 1964.
| Duration | 07 June 2017 - 03 September 2017 |
| Times | Tues/Wed 11am–6pm Thursday 11am–9pm Friday/Sat/Sun 11am–6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Whitechapel Gallery |
| Address | 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX |
| Contact | / info@whitechapelgallery.org / www.whitechapelgallery.org |