Cave of forgotten dreams
Vető Orsolya Lia and Réka Vidra’s joint exhibition takes the story of the Chauvet Cave as its point of departure to explore ways of thinking about the Earth as an interconnected system, as well as different forms of materiality. Through their installations, the two artists examine the relationship between time, fossil memory, and imagination.
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The title of the duo exhibition of Orsolya Lia Vető and Réka Vidra is taken from Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary, which was shot at the Chauvet Cave in southern France. The cave remained sealed off from humanity for approximately 40,000 years, and so the footprints and cave paintings left by prehistoric people have been preserved intact for posterity. The site remains closed to visitors to this day; however, in 2015 the Grotte Chauvet 2 – Ardèche opened as a ’replica cave’, an exact reproduction of the Chauvet Cave. Therefore, visitors cannot encounter the original site itself, only a carefully reconstructed substitute.
The exhibition — seemingly taking its place in the lineage of simulacra — centres on a planetary realism that views the Earth as an interconnected system. The works of Orsolya Lia Vető and Réka Vidra conjure space through a different kind of materiality. Vető’s site-specific paintings hover perpetually between the fluid documentation of time and fossil semiotics, meanwhile Vidra’s wool-built installation decarbonises the imagination through the illusion of structure.
