Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary

Featuring works by some 50 artists and collectives, Hollow Earth descends into the depths to explore questions of prehistory and myth, ritual and the future.

Every culture and religion has told stories about what lies beneath. Caves are where extraordinary events come to pass – the domain of gods and monsters, saints and shamans, births and burials.

Dark, dangerous and unstable, caves are places of visions, of experiences that are sacred as well as profane. More recently, they have become home to data farms, seed vaults and doomsday bunkers.

For millennia, the image and idea of the cave has exerted an enduring pull on artists. It has even been argued that the cave was the earliest studio and the first museum.

Following the 19th-century discoveries of rock paintings, caves became imagined as spaces of revelation and fantasy, providing clues to our collective impulse to produce images. After World War II, artists came to associate the cave with the primordial creative space, with a bunker-like refuge from the atomic era, and even with the dream of a truly underground cinema. Today, in an age of ecological breakdown, they are portals to the deep past and troubled futures, places where species and millennia intermingle.

Mapping both specific sites and imaginary underworlds, Hollow Earth considers why and how so many artists, musicians and filmmakers have been drawn below.

Featured artists

Featuring Hamed Abdalla, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Lee Bontecou, Sofia Borges, Brassaï, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Steven Claydon, Matt Copson, Juan Downey, Chioma Ebinama, Mary Beth Edelson, Laura Emsley, Barry Flanagan, Ilana Halperin, Frank Heath, Ed Herring, Michael Ho, Hans Hollein, Peter Hujar, Alison Knowles, Antti Lovag, Goshka Macuga, René Magritte, Gordon Matta-Clark, Emma McCormick-Goodhart, Santu Mofokeng, Henry Moore, Nadar, Pauline Oliveros, Lydia Ourahmane, Gordon Parks, Flora Parrott, Walter Pichler, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Liv Preston, Ben Rivers, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, NH Stubbing, Caragh Thuring, Kaari Upson, Jeff Wall, Aubrey Williams and Joseph Wright of Derby.

Partners

Hollow Earth: Art, Caves and the Subterranean Imaginary is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, developed in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary and in collaboration with Glucksman, Cork and RAMM, Exeter.

Supporters

This exhibition is generously supported by the Centre for the GeoHumanities; Royal Holloway, University of London, as part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme; and the Leverhulme Trust through the Phillip Leverhulme Prize.

All works from the series Hollowed Earth: The World of Underground Business Parks. Courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation