The seventeenth century was a time of great advancement for science, but it also presented a curious juxtaposition between superstition and science. A part of Europe’s Early Modern period and the birth of the Baroque cultural movement, the 1600s also encompassed the early years of the Scientific Revolution, when superstition and religion gave way to scientific reasoning. 500 years later and such attempts of replacing ideas based on myth or tradition with scientific advancements seem to circumvent our discourses where myths and reality are intertwined and provide “a poetic form of truth.

For its latest exhibition, Newchild is pleased to announce Foolish Fire, a group exhibition exploring art making as a means to create myths and/or truth.The artists in the exhibition seek to capture ideas of meaning and the construction of reality. A playful exhibition that seems to be inspired seventeenth-century encyclopaedias such as the Physica Curiosa. This encyclopedia, although still full of misconceptions, attempts to produce an account of observation of -and reflection on- real natural phenomena, the marvels of real life, exotic animals and foreign lands. A fascinating book where the metaphysical and the physical coexist in one reality.

Utilising a range of mediums and aesthetic tools, the artists in the show present psychological interpretations of their world experience, where the real and the fake can no longer be distinguished from each other.

Artists: Antonia Rodrian, Raqib Shaw, Kazuhito Kawai, Alyina Zaidi, Christopher Page, Jennifer Rochlin, Stefan Rinck