Curiosity: Art and the Pleasure of Knowing

Contributors: Brian Dillon, Marina Warner and Roger Malbert

Editors: Nadine Monem and Faye Robson

Designer: John Morgan Studio

Casebound
240 pages
133 colour + b/w ills
235 x 150 mm
978 1 85332 313 3

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing accompanies the Hayward Touring exhibition curated by Brian Dillon and organised in association with New York art and culture magazine Cabinet.

Taking the cabinet of curiosities as its founding motif, and through a combination of contemporary art and historical artefacts, Curiosity explores the contradictory pleasure that comes from the search for the wondrous and bizarre. Drawing on intriguing artworks, objects, images and narratives, this lavishly illustrated volume explores everything from the anthropological to the occult.

Contributors to the volume include Agency, Salvatore Arancio, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, Corinne May Botz, Pablo Bronstein, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Charles Le Brun, Gerard Byrne, Roger Caillois, Tacita Dean, Albert Dürer, Gunda Förster, Aurélien Froment, Philip Henry Gosse, Laurent Grasso, Thomas Grünfeld, Susan Hiller, Robert Hooke, Toril Johannessen, Nina Katchadourian, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaes Maes, Jeremy Millar, Matt Mullican, Katie Paterson, Aura Satz and The Center for Land Use Interpretation, amongst others.

Curiosity also includes new texts by Brian Dillon and Marina Warner, and an anthology of writings on the topic of curiosity throughout the ages.