DM: A Taxonomy of Ghosts

The installation/mural 'DM: A Taxonomy of Ghosts' features as part of the 2016 exhibition 'ExtraNaturel: A voyage of initiation through the collection of the Beaux-arts de Paris'. Williams & Schäfer�s contribution to the exhibition is a new work, a huge mural in gold, silver and copper leaf, that reworks and references Dis Manibus: A Taxonomy of Ghosts from Popular Forms. A reworking in a new context for DM: A Taxonomy of Ghosts � this new site-specific work � re-presents the classification of ghostly tropes for a different audience. The work changes scale, and format to become huge and overpowering, and references works and objects within the ExtraNaturel exhibition as it details the characteristics and maps the context, behaviour and disposition of ghosts and ghost-seeing in the Western tradition. Whilst the work references back to an earlier project at Mildred�s Lane in Pennsylvania, this re-working and representation is an entirely new work of art made specifically for the context of the exhibition ExtraNaturel at the École des Beaux-arts.

The exhibition ExtraNaturel is curated by American artist and long-term collaborator of Williams, Mark Dion, along with Gulbenkian curator Sarina Basta. The show explores representations of the supernatural drawn from collections of historical material held by the École des Beaux-arts, and presents these in relation to work dealing with similar themes from a group of contemporary artists. The works of the collection relating to the non-natural address different categories of magic and the alchemical, the double, the hybrid, the world of sabbats and sorcerers, the otherworldly and ghosts. The collection spans 500 years of history, containing medieval artifacts, architecture, master prints and paintings by artists such as Francisco de Goya, Albrecht Dürer, Baccio Baldini, Francesco Piranesi, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Jean Honoré Fragonard. International contemporary artists participating in the event include Dion and Williams, James Lee Byers, Dana Sherwood, Matt Mullican, Wallace Berman, Art Orienté Objet, Rafael Zarka, Morgane Tschiember, Extra Lucida, and others.

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