Rhona Hoffman and Musings on a Green World

The new exhibition “SERGIO VIEIRA DE MELLO: RALLY PARIS-DARFUR” by New Catalogue is a celebration and attack on free market capitalism. By turning the art gallery into a showroom for an brand new motorcycle we are at once taken by our desire for the beautiful object and also repelled. The team imagines a rally from Paris to Darfur a new take on the Paris to Dakar Rally.

Through viewing the new motorcycle in the gallery space we are transfixed as consumers both consuming the art experience and imagining ourself as shoppers. The consuming experience is darkened by the realization that the motorcycle is a memorial to Sergio Vieira de Mello, a well known and widely respected Brazilian United Nations diplomat who was killed by a car bomb at the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.