Conspiracy Season

Verdurin is pleased to announce an exhibition and season of events examining the aesthetic dimension of conspiracy and conspiracy theories. 

9/11 Watch Party

Join Verdurin for the as-seen-on-TV event of the year. Two decades after the attacks on the World Trade Center changed the course of history, experience again the fear, tears, and paranoia of the live news channel analysis and raw unedited footage of the disaster. 

9/11 Watch Party reformulates the live responses of the mainstream media, twinning them with conspiratorial commentators in a polyphonic installation of sensorially overwhelming scale. By the end of the evening, you will have been taken in by the ineluctable seductive power of conspiracy theories popularised by “truthers” on social media and inspired to rebuild New York City’s skyline by artistic responses commissioned by the Port Authority. 

9/11 Watch Party on 11 September 2024 launches a season of events examining the aesthetic dimension of conspiracy and conspiracy theories. The cycle responds to the increasingly seductive power of conspiratorial ideas over the populace at a time of a crisis of meaning. 

Stealth

The living exhibition Stealth will unfold at Verdurin in the autumn and winter 2024, inviting an expanding roster of artists to promote conspiracies or debunk conspiracy theories. Artworks will engage in a conspiracy of their own, challenging the relationship between aesthetic stimuli and notions of reality. If conspiracy theories emerge when the official narrative fails, what role does art play in fuelling or suppressing alternative constructions? Is contemporary art itself part of the narrative failure?

Cells and Salons

The conspiracy season will combine intellectual rigour with unbridled aesthetic experience. It will extend the invitation to conspire and theorise to the public. Following in the footsteps of the Parisian socialite Léontine Lippmann who inspired the salon of Proust’s Mme Verdurin, Verdurin’s Cells and Salons on 30 October 2024 will build a conspiracy of its own out of secrecy and arcane understanding. You will be invited to share your best-kept secret ideas – even slanderous or sublime – with fertile co-conspiratorial ears and minds. Cells and Salons plants the seed of aesthetic desires and watches them give rise to new worlds.