LIQUID

ANTIQUITY:

CONVERSATIONS

The installation Liquid Antiquity: Conversations was conceived and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. DS+R’s installation is a complement to the launch of Brooke Holmes’ book, Liquid Antiquity, a rethinking of the relationship between the classical and the contemporary through image and text. In its first installation at the Benaki Museum, six installations were distributed through the antiquities galleries each structured around a video interview between Holmes and one of six artists who contributed to the book: Matthew Barney, Paul Chan, Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, Asad Raza, and Kaari Upson. The original settings of the interviews—artists’ studios and apartments—are superimposed on the real space of the museum and the dialogue is extended to the museum visitor. The Benaki Museum’s galleries were both the backdrop and content in which ancient artifacts mix with contemporary artists in dialogue with the past and present. Moving experientially from the private reading relationship with the book, to the static presence of the artifact, to active video encounters with featured artists, the visitor is invited to reassess not only our relationship with ancient Greece, but also to participate in the shifting scales and contours of the “we” who encounter the classical past. This creates and augments a series of singular environments and personal perspectives for engaging antiquity as liquid and heterogeneous, rather than fixed and mono–cultural.