An Infinite Conversation

The exhibition An Infinite Conversation. Artists’ books, ephemera and documents was designed as an addendum to the permanent exhibition of Museu Coleção Berardo, and presents a selection of artists’ books, posters and other ephemera from the Teixeira de Freitas Collection. The exhibition illustrates the range of thought and process that surrounds art making and shows the various forms it can take, suggesting what is perhaps a more intimate view.

The French writer André Malraux once remarked that the art book is “a museum without walls,” the material presented here often deals with this extension of the artwork outside of the gallery, through different channels of distribution and encounter. The temporary gathering together of this material within the walls of a museum allows a moment to reflect upon the nature of its movement through the world, how its dispersal is related to the spread of ideas and the spread of ideas and dialogues that underpins every artwork. The display also tells us something about the nature of collecting itself. In the words of Jean Baudrillard, how the “everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry, into a triumphant unconscious discourse.” There is a dialogue that occurs between the two collections that helps to reveal their unique logic as well as the logic of the collection in general.

Organised into a series of rooms that reflect different aspects of the collection, An Infinite Conversation presents a wide variety of encounters, connections and dissonances that illuminate the museum's display in new ways. An artwork is an unstable thing and often what surrounds it reveals it. This exhibition aims to propose new routes towards understanding some of the key artists and activities associated with art from the 1960s to the present day. History is often greatly enriched by paying attention to its margins, and the distributed network of meaning and experience that this collection of books and ephemera represents is a compelling survey of the edges and of the spaces between the artworks that exist in the collection of the Museu Coleção Berardo.

Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Thom O’Nions
Curators