Falling Fictions: A metafiction exhibition

Metafiction is a literary device used by writers to draw attention to the physical act of writing. Typically, pieces tread a fine line between the real, non-fiction, and the unreal, fiction. In essence, metafiction is a story about writing a story. Through deliberately including the reader, involving them as part of the story, it allows them to affect and change what happens around them. In an exhibition context, metafiction purposefully encourages the viewer to form their own conclusions and connections, reacting to their environment and the artworks surrounding them.

Over the course of a year, curators Alejandro Alonso Díaz, Amy E. Brown and Rosie Snaith developed the exhibition, Falling Fictions, with the aim of exploring the capacity of objects to inspire narratives. The project brought together contemporary artworks, Wunderkammer pieces and archival material from the Olbricht Collection at me Collector’s Room, Berlin. Based on the stories that the collection houses and the physical qualities of the objects, the project revealed the, sometimes hidden, connections between reality and fiction.

Invited artist and writer, Francesco Pedraglio performed an anthropological investigation of objects that led to him creating a story founded in the myth of Mexican lore and cosmogony, the coming to life of objects. In his story, an object begins to fall. As it falls, it falls through thirteen Heavens and nine Underworlds before coming to rest, finally, on Earth. Throughout the process of falling, and in each layer, the object changes form, shifting to become something else, both physically and conceptually, gathering new meaning. Told in three voices- The Voice of the Room, the Chorus and The Voice of the Night – the tale gradually picks up pace, reaching a crescendo akin to the collision an object might make on the gallery floor, where it lands fully-formed.

For the full commissioned text please click here

Falling Fictions is on display at me Collector’s Room, Berlin until the 15^th of November 2015. The artists are; Doug Aitken, Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, Bazon Brock, Al Chang, Hansjoachim Dietrich, Marcel Dzama, Slawomir Elsner, Claire Fontaine, Imi Giese , KH Hödicke, John Isaacs, Ragnar Kjartansson, André Kertész, Imi Knoebel, Bernd Lohaus, Konrad Lueg, David Ostrowski, Blinky Palermo, Francesco Pedraglio, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Diter Rot, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerhard Rühm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tomas Schmit, Gavin Turk, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Wewerka, Lambert Maria Wintersberger, WOLS and objects from the Wunderkammer.