stranger than kindness the nick cave exhibition

The Montreal exhibition is presented and produced by Victor Shiffman (Workers of Art) as a co-production with Le Festival International de Jazz de Montreal and evenko. It was curated and produced by the Royal Danish library in collaboration with the Australian Music Vault at Arts Centre Melbourne. The exhibition, dedicated to the life journey of this impressive Australian born singer- songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional actor, was first presented at The Black Diamond in Copenhagen, and was developed and designed by Christina Back (Royal Danish library) and Janine Barrand (Arts Centre Melbourne). Today marks the grand official opening of the The Nick Cave Exhibition : #StrangerThanKindness that is currently running at the Galerie de la Maison du Festival – at the Quartier des spectacles, Montréal from April 8th to August 7th, 2022 ! Perhaps the thing we have spent so much time escaping, or attempting to create, was there all along – the blessed space, the sacred space, the truly creative place – the world around us.Galerie de la Maison du Festival – Quartier des Spectacles Perhaps, the sacred space is simply the world itself – a hallowed place where we all exist at this time, where we engage with life in all its many tempers, within the present moment.

Maybe these lofty claims about the imagination are yet more artistic hubris, a further place to hide, like the office – another invented way to separate ourselves from the world. My sacred space became the rolling fire of the imagination.īut, you know, these days, I wonder about this too. The sacred space, for the artist, is within the creative flow, at the crucial and fiery point of artistic intention, where time suddenly contracts and the work finds its power and its groove. I came to understand that the sacred space is the imagination itself, or rather the time spent inside the actual idea – the song you are composing, the story you are writing, or the picture you are painting. Handing it over was one of the things that allowed me to find my way back to the world. My office is currently in Montreal as it travels the world with the exhibition.

In 2019 I gave my office – the desk and the entire contents – to the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen for the very beautiful Stranger Than Kindness – The Nick Cave Exhibition. But in time this office, my retreat, started to become a place of exclusion or of hiding, a place where I could turn away from the world, under the guise of being creative, at the expense of all else. This office, with its massive desk, typewriter, shelves of books, and its accumul ated piles of artefacts and self-absorbed scribblings, I considered to be my ‘sacred space’, a fortress where I could shut the door and lock out the world. For most of my creative life I did indeed maintain an office at home.

Stranger than kindness the nick cave exhibition