“What does it mean to restore something? It means to make something old, new again. It’s a temporal paradox, especially in a place like Versailles that went through so many changes. So when you choose to restore a certain room as it was in a certain period, the period you choose is based on your contemporary worldview. What we are looking at in these museum restorations is historical revisionism and the society’s superego.”
– Robert Polidori
For over 20 years Robert Polidori has photographed Versailles. This exhibition, the first in Canada of this series, showcases his most recent, highly detailed photographs made with a large format camera. These images show things that you see but you don’t even know that you’re seeing— the layers of history and effects of time. For Polidori, rooms play a central role as “memory theaters” or receptacles for meaning. The paintings, sculptures and decorative elements in Versailles are symbols of cultural displacement and surrogates for individuals as well as entire populations.
Robert Polidori was born in Montreal and lives in New York City. His photographic series include Chernobyl, Versailles, Havana and New Orleans. Museum collections and exhibitions include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibliotheque National in Paris and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (survey exhibition in 2009). Steidl has previously published Havana and New Orleans and the three-volume compendium of Versailles will be available in January 2009.
