Introduction

For this site-specific project, the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions commissioned by Dia for The Hispanic Society of America, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster takes as her point of departure the Hispanic Society’s internationally renowned research library. On view September 23, 2009 through April 18, 2010, and organized by Dia curator at large Lynne Cooke, chronotopes & dioramas is Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major solo exhibition in the United States.

For this project, Gonzalez-Foerster has chosen to treat a 3,700 square foot gallery located within the former Museum of the American Indian as an “annex” to the Society’s main library. (Recently renovated by Dia, this gallery is located in a traditional Beaux-Arts style building reopened to the public in 2008, after a 14-year closure.) Here, the artist will augment the library’s holdings of contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature with a selection of texts, both well-known and personally significant.

In the center of the gallery space, Gonzalez-Foerster will construct an approximately 40 foot wide, floor to ceiling structure containing three large-scale dioramas. Inspired by traditional natural history museum displays, the dioramas will depict three terrains – the tropics, the desert, and the North Atlantic. Traces of man-made interventions will be evident in each landscape, whose scenes will be rendered by a team of specialists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Additionally, a variety of quotations and texts will be printed onto the exterior of the dioramas in a panoramic calligram and will be immediately visible upon entering the gallery.

Gonzalez-Foerster’s three topographies will each contain various forms of literature ranging across works by J.G. Ballard, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Delany, and Clarice Lispector. Books will be sited in the dioramas, like the flora and fauna specimens of natural history habitat displays, as if they were the ‘indigenous inhabitants’ of each terrain.

The “annex” will amplify the Society’s historical holdings with works that span the 20th century, offering narratives of fiction and diaspora that parallel the institution’s geographically based model of collecting.