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Mat Collishaw

Deliverance
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Mat Collishaw
Deliverance, installation (2008)
Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Mat Collishaw
Deliverance, installation (2008)
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Born 1966 in Nottingham (England), he lives and works in London.


Mat Collishaw was part of the first wave of “Young British Artists” and, as such, took part in Freeze, the exhibition organised by Damien Hirst with artists such as Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume and Angus Fairhurst. He went on to feature in many exhibitions that marked the history of Britart. His works have been acquired by numerous collectors and prestigious museums such as Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
 

At le Printemps de septembre, Collishaw is exhibiting one of his masterpieces, Deliverance, an installation which illustrates better than any other the general theme of this event, “History is mine!” It is a reenactment, an appropriation of the tragedy of Beslan, the small Ossetian town where, in 2004, a Chechen commando took hundreds of schoolchildren and their teachers hostage. The “liberation” of the school by Russian troops turned into a bloodbath. Collishaw’s installation is a repetitive series of ghostly images showing men and women, individually or in groups, holding bloodied children. They are like modern Pietà figures, victims close to our heart (over 300 children died in Beslan), a revisiting of a terrible Massacre of the Innocents. “I am interested in shaking man’s heart,” said the photographer William Eugene Smith. “He loves that.”