“There are so many highlights! Nick Cave’s body of work encompasses a wide range of media and his archives are bountiful and diverse. The exhibition is a work of art in its own right. Being created together with the artist, the exhibition has become an unorthodox fusion of biography, autobiography and fiction, a spatial, multi-sensory exploration of Cave’s many real and imagined universes. “Stranger Than Kindness is created in collaboration with Nick Cave and Arts Centre Melbourne that holds a great part of Nick Cave’s collection. Here, the exhibition’s co-curator Christina Back explains the story behind the show in her own words, and talks through some of its fascinating highlights. Shown via installations – one of which intricately recreates Cave’s office – and soundscapes, Stranger Than Kindness is an biographical exhibition which, according to Cave, “feels unprecedented in its audacious reach, its feet rooted in the past while extending into the uncertain future”. They are a support system of manic tangential information.” “These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script or score along. “There is an enormous amount of this peripheral stuff – drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages, scribblings and drafts – which are the secret and unformed property of the artist,” he says.

Cave, who co-curated and co-designed the exhibition, describes these as “the material that gives birth to and nourishes this official work”. Much of what makes up Stranger Than Kindness are objects that feed into Cave’s artistic process.

Bringing together a wide-reaching collection of objects – numbering over 300, displayed across eight rooms – both created and collected by Cave over the course of his life and career, Stranger Than Kindness is a uniquely immersive show that explores the celebrated musician’s creative sphere. The long-awaited show was postponed as cities around the world went into lockdown, but has finally opened at The Black Diamond, part of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, and will run until February next year. Stranger Than Kindness, the Gucci-sponsored exhibition that looks inside the world of Nick Cave, was due to open in March of this year.

Stranger than kindness by nick cave