Simulations at the Byzantine Fresco Chapel

In a Parisian apartment in 1983, Dominique de Menil viewed a smuggler’s black market photographs of thirteenth-century frescoes looted from the Cypriot church of St. Themonianos. Determined to right a wrong, de Menil spearheaded an investigation that would lead to the building of the Byzantine Fresco Chapel in Houston in 1997. With an agreement from the Archbishop of Cyprus, The Menil Foundation became the stewards of the reunited fresco fragments, in turn housing them in a consecrated space. When that agreement ended in 2012, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel was deconsecrated and repurposed to exhibit contemporary art installations.

From 2016 to 2018, the space was home to Francis Alÿs’ Fabiola Project. This installation constitutes a record of Alÿs’ collecting habits. Since 1992, the artist has been combing the flea markets of Europe and Latin America to amass a collection of more than 500 individual hand-painted copies of a now-lost portrait of St. Fabiola. In recent years, Fabiola Project has been shown in various spaces, including monasteries and convents, as well as art museums.

In this paper, I interrogate the compatibility of the Fabiola Project with the spatial context of the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, a building that retains its original name if not its consecrated status. Despite its focus on icons, the installation runs conceptual interference with the Byzantine aspect of the site. My evaluation considers how the Fabiola Project slips in and out of the ontological category of religious simulation while re-envisioning the concept of history as accumulation rather than line.