A groundbreaking exhibition tracing the emergence and evolution of mashup culture will soon occupy the entire four floors of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The most ambitious exhibition in the history of the Gallery to date, MashUp: The Birth Of Modern Culture is the first international survey to examine the development of the now-ubiquitous mode of art production known as “mashup”, collage or remix.

MashUp will explore how artists incorporate found images, objects, sounds and words into their work, starting with the movement’s emergence at the turn of the twentieth century and showing how it has become a dominant force in our world today. It will feature 371 works by 156 artists, filmmakers, architects, musicians and designers, such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Hannah Höch, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Jean-Luc Goddard, Frank Gehry, Dara Birnbaum, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Sherrie Levine, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Christian Marclay, Gu Wenda, Stan Douglas, Hito Steyerl, Isa Genzken, DJ Spooky and Tobias Wong, among many others.

MashUp will span nearly a century and a half and a broad range of media including photography, video, architecture, film, sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, drawing, painting, animation, music, digital media, illustration and fashion design. The exhibition will trace how new technologies expanded the production and circulation of images, text and music—ranging from collages and readymades, to mass-media appropriation, to sampling and hacking–through works loaned from an extensive list of 75 private and public collections from eight countries around the globe.

MashUp is curated by the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Chief Curator/Associate Director Daina Augaitis, Senior Curator Bruce Grenville, and Assistant Curator Stephanie Rebick. In keeping with the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the exhibition, the Gallery invited a diverse range of 30 local and international curators, scholars, artists, designers and architects to contribute to the scholarship and presentation of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue.

“MashUp is a milestone exhibition for us. It is the largest show ever mounted by the Gallery, providing a comprehensive look at how the ‘collage' emerged as a mode of artmaking in the early twentieth century and has evolved through the rapid uptake of technology and digital media to facilitate new modes of production in all fields of visual culture today,” said Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “This broad and inclusive show presents a remarkable and diverse array of works through the lens of myriad voices and perspectives. We thank our many collaborators for their ingenuity and enthusiasm and look forward to welcoming our visitors to this extraordinary exhibition.”

Bruce Grenville, Senior Curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery, said: “The MashUp exhibition and publication trace a distinct path through the history of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, in response to a considerable void in the scholarship on this important subject. MashUp reveals the evolution of a creative methodology that has shifted and mutated in four distinct stages from the early twentieth century to the present to accommodate critical changes in technology and ideology. Fundamental issues of creativity, interdisciplinarity, new technologies and intellectual property are decisively connected to the birth of mashup culture."

The exhibition is organized in four chronological sub-sections that represent key periods in the history of mashup culture: the early-twentieth century, the post-war, the late twentieth century, and the twenty-first century. More details about the exhibition, including a full list of artists and exhibition contributors, as well as related public events, can be found at vanartgallery