“Theories on Forgetting” maps evolutions of cultural symbolism through the work of 18 contemporary artists. Questioning how popular images originate, gain importance, obsolesce, and renew, the exhibition surveys a broad range of artworks with source amnesia: strange relics and personal figments reveal the emergence of new languages fertilized by previous ones. These diverse cultural apparitions engage individual and collective memory as subject, action, and material. The rise and fall of icons occurs cyclically, and sometimes recursively. In Christian Jankowski’s film installation Casting Jesus (2011), the Vatican plays host to a reality show in search of a church-ordained face of Christ, paneled by experts in divinity. In the series Self-Portrait of You + Me, after the Factory (2007), Douglas Gordon

Read More: Exhibition at Gagosian maps evolutions of cultural symbolism through the work of 18 artists