50 Moons of Saturn

Pictured: Johann Dieter Wassmann, THE RINGS OF SATURN, 1896, from the 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

In the coming weeks and months I thought I’d grant readers a slight reprieve from what I realise has been a string of dreary posts chronicling the recent woes of MuseumZeitraum and instead cheer you up with a series of discussions exploring the melancholic world set forth in Daniel Birnbaum’s upcoming exhibition 50 Moons of Saturn for the Torino Triennale, 6 November 2008 – 18 January 2009. This second edition of the Torino Triennale, heretofore known as T2, is inspired by the slow turning world of the planet sublime.

In choosing the sixth planet from the sun, we are told Mr. Birnbaum is “…creating a new geography in the contemporary art world… a constellation of artists who work under the sign of ambivalence.”

The exhibition actually features two headlining planets, along with its 50 lesser moons; the heavyweights being the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, presented at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and the Chinese-American artist Paul Chan at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo centre for contemporary art in Turin.

The first ten of the 50 moons were announced last month, including Ulla von Brandenburg, Matthew Brannon, Gerard Byrne, Simon Dybbroe Möller, Annika Von Hausswolff, Lara Favaretto, Haegue Yang, Koo Jeong-a, Wilhelm Sasnal and Donald Urquhart. We await news of who gets to be Enceladus, Mimas, Rhea, Iapetus, Phoebe and of course the big daddy of them all, Titan.

More to come as the summer progresses…