Waterlog & Searching for Sebald

The Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery has just announced the opening of a new exhibition that reflects the ongoing relevance of W.G. Sebald to contemporary visual artists, who find common cause and inspiration in his writings.Waterlog includes specially commissioned works created by seven artists who were asked to respond to the landscape of East Anglia, which Sebald explored in The Rings of Saturn: Tacita Dean, Marcus Coates, Alec Finlay and Guy Moreton (working collaboratively), Alexander and Susan Maris (also working as a team), and Simon Pope.

Waterlog has an extensive website (with its own blog) at Click here to go to the Waterlog website.

Although there does not appear to be a catalog for Waterlog, there is another ambitious project to look forward to and this one will have a publication. Searching for Sebald is being edited by Lise Platt for the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Los Angeles and will also be available through Distributed Art Press and Amazon. The book is due out later this spring and will include an extensive number of essays and artist’s projects. According to the ICI’s website, the monograph “will be the first to explore Sebald’s fictive world through the idiosyncratic and anti-heroic photographs that propel and interrupt his labyrinthine narratives. The book will also feature an English translation of an interview Sebald gave in 1997 in which he talks exclusively about his use of photographs. It contains some of Sebald’s most illuminating and poetic remarks about the topic yet.”

Of perhaps even more interest is the fact that ICI is also creating a special edition of 100 “traveling suitcases” that will sell for $500. Each suitcase will include artwork by twenty invited artists. I have mine reserved!For more information visit Click here to go to the Sebald page at the ICI.