https://www.kwag.ca/en/about/resources/forweb_kwag_annualreport_2012.pdf

Another Victory Over the Sun

Miguel Calderón

Spencer Finch

Scott Johnson

Juan Muñoz

Erin Shirreff

Melanie Smith

David Zimmer

Co-curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Adam Lerner for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA Denver)

For Another Victory Over the Sun, all overhead lighting in the Main Gallery at KW|AG was turned off, allowing the works of art to act as their own source of illumination. The exhibition title refers to the 1913 opera,

Victory Over the Sun, a cornerstone for modern art, which celebrated the power of human creativity to invent new worlds. The original opera, with sets designed by the influential Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, evinced the desire to transcend the visible world, striving instead to arrive at a state of pure feeling. Museums often operate in the same way as theatre: the museum building as a stage on which visitors become performers moving through space and encountering works of art. Removing the incidental light in the exhibition space further announced the unfolding drama. Writer Brian O’Doherty once described the “white cube” spaces of museums and galleries as sites in which “we see not art but the space first.” Another Victory Over the Sun inverted this idea by creating spaces where the gallery architecture disappeared in a series of discrete, dream-like environments