Anish Kapoor
1000 Names, 1979-1980
5 elements
mixed media & pigment
74 x 71.5 x 71.5 cm (overall)
‘We shall not cease
from exploration and the end of all
our exploring will be to arrive
where we started and know the place
for the first time.’
T S Eliot from ‘Little Gidding’,
Four Quartets
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A festival is a wonderful opportunity to delve deeply, to risk the unknown and to explore ideas – cultural and philosophical, political and spiritual, abstract and specific. In putting this Brighton Festival programme together we have sought to find points of similarity in the content of the many different art works and, indeed, art forms on offer – that is to say the ideas that lie behind or underneath them. The connections made between works are often made at a tangent to the works themselves allowing the exploration of a different ‘third’ or ‘in-between’ space.
I am often asked what my works mean, what they are about. And I have often countered that they are not ‘about’ anything, that I have nothing particular to say, no ‘message’ to give. But I am of course very concerned with a work’s content and a work’s context and the way in which meaning arises out of the encounter between body and object or non object. The intimate, the wondrous and perhaps even the sublime are all entities that cause us to question what, why and how? Art can and must engage these simple but fundamental questions.
There are works of real challenge and seriousness here alongside the humorous and entertaining, and they are all part of a total experience that I hope has a cumulative power to excite the mind, to be memorable and meaningful.
Brighton is a place of wonderful contradictions and juxtapositions, of energy and beauty, ideal for the sort of exploration that should
be at the heart of an arts festival.
Anish Kapoor, Guest Artistic Director
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