In 2017, the Academy of Arts in Berlin presented an exhibition examining the relationship between the critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and the writer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). The exhibition included a number of contemporary artworks, including de Waal's casualty list from 2017, and this essay about the work appeared in the catalogue.
During the Night
This essay was included in the catalogue for Edmund de Waal's curated exhibition, During the Night, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The show was the culmination of three years spent choosing particular historical objects, paintings and treasures from the museum's collections, from 16th-century corals, dragon-shaped vessels and Roman fibulae to works by Joachim Patinir, Cranach and Roelant Savery. Inspired by an encounter with a drawing of a nightmare by Albrecht Dürer, the exhibition explored themes of anxiety, the fear of the unknown and what terrors can be found after dark.
This wall text accompanied the piece Atmosphere, which was commissioned specially for the Sunley Gallery at Turner Contemporary, Margate, overlooking the North Sea, and was a response to the changing landscape and clouds viewed from the gallery and the architecture of the space.
a local history
a local history is an installation of three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside the Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site of Cambridge University. These vitrines are meant to be discovered, to be happened upon as you come and go across the site. They are there to make you pause momentarily. They are not sculpture as a Grand Statement. This essay was included in the accompanying pamphlet.
In response to an invitation by the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Edmund de Waal created a piece to hang in the Theseus Temple in Vienna as part of a series of contemporary installations. Lichtzwang takes its name from the title of a book of poems by Paul Celan, a man for whom language was a necessity and a terrible response to silence. The vessels are placed like words on a page, or people passing through a building, held only by 'Lichtzwang' - the pressure, force, compulsion of light. This text accompanied the exhibition.
You take an object from your pocket
In 2014 Phaidon published the most comprehensive survey of Edmund de Waal's career to date. The monograph features texts by Emma Crichton-Miller, AS Byatt, Colm Toibin and Peter Carey, as well as this essay by de Waal.
On White: Porcelain stories from the Fitzwilliam
On White: Porcelain Stories from the Fitzwilliam Museum explores the story of obsession with porcelain. For this exhibition Edmund de Waal has re-curated displays of the museum's permanent collection with poetry, hidden letters, photographs and objects from his residency in Jingdezhen, China. Alongside these objects, are three installations of de Waal's own porcelain. This essay was included in the accompanying pamphlet.
Something else, somewhere other
For this 2012 exhibition, Edmund de Waal created a new series of pieces inspired by the collections and interiors at Waddesdon. De Waal's series of installations, threaded through the ground floor rooms, are a conversation with the collections at Waddesdon. Some of these groups of porcelain vessels relate to spectacular pieces of furniture, or echo the formal groupings of objects in 18th-century interiors. Others take on ideas of collecting itself, how things are kept together, lost, stolen or dispersed. This essay is an exploration of the process behind the exhibition.