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Now’s The Time is a multi-site project, incorporating a series of artists’ installations and community participation events, located in art venues and empty shop spaces around Exeter city centre. Initiated by students on the MA Curation course at University of Exeter, the aim is to provide a platform for socially engaged projects that address the new cultural landscape we find ourselves in, post-pandemic.

Reconstructing Duccio, Exeter

LESLEY KERMAN Reconstructing Duccio

Curated by Imogen Haisman

Exeter City Centre, from 9 June 2022

Presented as part of the multi-site curatorial project NOWS THE TIME, Lesley Kerman’s Reconstructing Duccio offers a visual portal into the deeply religious allegory of Christs crucifixion through its temporal manifestation within the virtual realm. The scenes following the Passion of Christ will be digitally mediated across the commercial epicentre of Exeter’s city centre and hence address our established predilections regarding the Western canon through decentralised mediums, locations, and a disrupted understanding of value. 

Originally commissioned by the city of Siena in 1308, this altarpiece today is remediated and reinserted as an artwork located in the crypto-verse and offered as a non-fungible token. In being both physically dispersed and digitally resolved within the richly commercial realm of Exeter, Kerman’s reconstruction of Duccio brings light on how death and spirituality can be decentralised through contemporary sites of worship. We are effectively offering homeopathic drips of Duccio’s practice in secular spaces to question how exchange value inflicts on the way in which we engage with the narrative and physicality of the altarpiece. Through its physical fragmentation and positional agency, the minted Maesta places the notions of worship and fungibility in wrought contention. 

All images courtesy of Simon Tutty Photography and the University of Exeter

http://www.simontutty.co.uk/