"Modern consciousness was born in darkness: the darkness of the cave. It was in the subterranean dwellings of early man where, in the words of Werner Herzog, ‘the modern human soul had awakened’, in social rituals and visual expressions that testify to the human capacity to reflect, sublimate and create. In our collective unconscious, the story of the cave is the story of aesthetic invention, of ideation, of the slow coming into being of a complex, sensitive intelligence, located someplace between primordial chaos and the first structures of civilization. In its most famous philosophical treatment, of course, the cave is the allegorical locus of our truths, and the birthplace of our political emancipation. A shadowy place that hides the answers to all the questions of mankind in its infinite cracks and folds." | excerpt from the exhibition presentation text