The title of Charles Saatchi’s new exhibition is Pangaea, a 20th-century word that conjures 20th-century fantasies of the world in its infancy when all the current continents were one. Imagine a single great landmass creaking as the primordial thrusts of its volcanic core did battle with the cooling forces of its single surrounding ocean until, some 200 million years ago, with one gigantic crack, it broke asunder. This first crack, roughly around the Tropic of Cancer, divided Pangaea into two smaller supercontinents: Laurasia, which we define as North America, Greenland, Europe and Asia (excluding India), and Gondwanaland, which comprised India, Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica. When later cracks appeared, and into them the mighty ocean poured, they too were divided. Thus were formed the familiar lesser masses of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the Americas, and with them the humbler oceans of our atlases.
Source link : https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/exhibitions/pangaea-new-art-from-africa-and-latin-america-saatchi-gallery-exhibition-review-9234776.html
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Publish date : 2014-04-03 03:00:00
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