UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

DANCING WITH THE MOON: MARCEL DZAMA WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIEND PETTIBON

AT PERA MUSEUM, ISTANBUL

20th March – 10th August 2025

‘This feeling of strangeness is shared by all men, that the entire human race suffers from the division between itself and the rest of the world.’

Albert Camus

In Classical times, in the Renaissance, in the Enlightenment, drawing was considered one of the most direct ways to express ideas. Today, armed with all the image weaponry born out of photography and film, drawing might seem to have been demoted. Marcel Dzama uses film, words and performance, but drawing and painting on paper are at the centre of his, and his friend Raymond Pettibon’s work. We tend today not to look for too much intellectual content in drawings. To explain why we are misguided, this essay argues that Dzama and Pettibon have inherited similar contradictions and dichotomies to those that tortured the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The most direct link to this intellectual vigour for Dzama is with Duchamp, his namesake, with whom he identifies.