“Stranger than Kindness explores the intersection between Nick Cave’s inner and outer worlds”. It’s the first line of the introduction that greets you at the exhibition’s entrance, and while I didn’t think much of it at first, it became quickly clear that this exhibition was more than just a collection of relics. I was seeing the seeds.

The show is a labyrinthine art project that splices together important stages in Nick’s life, replete with the people and things that have shaped him. There’s a sense running throughout not only of what was, but of what was lost and, most of all, of what came of it all. Encapsulating Nick’s obsessions with a yearning to define those obsessions into words, the exhibit melds the visual with music soundtracks—some tense and destabilizing, as if to warn that the voyage was not smooth—written by Nick and close collaborator Warren Ellis. The scores are punctuated by snippets of sonic memories—”Here’s Johnny!”, “Hands up who wants to die!”.

The presentation begins at the start—to Nick’s youth, with mementoes of his parents and his early inspirations—Leonard Cohen, punk progenitors The Saints, Johnny Carson—along with clues about Nick’s growing restlessness. Among these are glimpses of his first band, The Boys Next Door, and a “letter of concern” addressed to his father from the headmaster at Caulfield Grammar School: “I have become somewhat concerned about aspects of Nicholas’ attitude,” reads the letter, which goes on to list staff grievances about Nick’s general uncooperativeness. There’s an old promo video extolling the family friendliness of the town his family moved to when Nick was two. “Wangaratta was where he grew up,” says the writing on the wall. “The town became Cave’s playground where he spent days jumping off the railway bridge in the Ovens River, looking at the girls at the local swimming pool…”.

There’s the room dedicated to The Boys Next Door’s transformation into seminal goth-punk band The Birthday Party, set up to look like a red, pitched-up circus tent. Another room is a reconstruction of Nick’s living quarters in 1980s Berlin, complete with small fridge, cot, and an oversized desk. It includes an alcove-ensconced office space/bedroom that is a mess of books and notebooks, saints and earthly idols, lyric sheets and torn pages, locks of hair on a rung, and so many other details of Nick’s febrile creative state that it’s impossible to take it all in. To reach its dizzying heights, the first thing we’re prompted to do is use the step ladder.

There’s a dark room—in fact, most of the rooms here are dark and shadowy, enhancing the perception that I was tip-toeing through Nick’s subconscious—with a dozen screens arrayed in a horizontal curve. Current and former members of The Bad Seeds pop in and out of the screens to tell their story in a narrative arc that gives order to band’s at-times chaotic evolution.

One room literally made my spine tingle, such was its otherworldliness—Nick’s contemporary library-office. It is so richly and realistically furnished—it looks lived in—that as soon as I’d crossed into it and heard the clacking of a typewriter in the background, I could’ve sworn I’d inadvertently dropped in on Nick in his home. The place is resplendent with oriental rugs, old wood furniture, statues, LP covers, instruments you can play, portraits, and endless reminders of Nick’s obsession with people and words—the latter of others and his own. But there’s more. Breaking the plush home-life illusion is the Grinderman music booth you enter through a bead door. Its walls are covered entirely in sketches by Nick of naked women in various stages of exposed genitalia and, well, grinding. My parting view as I left the library-office was of a large print on the wall of Nick standing with two of his children, Earl and Arthur, the latter the son he and Susie lost in 2015.

It’s a loss made even more poignant when I come across Leonard Cohen’s letter of condolence. “Dear Nick, I am with you brother, LC”.

The last room of the exhibit feels like a summation of everything that came before. The room is small and intimate, illuminated only by the phrases and sentences projected temporarily on the wall and taken from Nick’s book, Stranger Than Kindness: “You are born. You build yourself piece by piece. You construct a narrative. You become an individual, surrounding yourself with all that you love. You are wounded too, sometimes, and left scarred. Yet you become a heroic and unique embodiment of both the things you cherish and the things that cause you pain…”

It’s a fitting end to an exhibition devoted to the power of words and to the people and things that made Nick Cave the great artist he is.

Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition runs from April 8 to August 7, 2022, at Galerie de la Maison du Festival, 305 Ste. Catherine Street West, Montreal, Quebec. Tickets can be purchased atevenko.ca.

The exhibition was initially created for The Black Diamond, in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Montreal exhibition is presented and produced by Victor Shiffman (Workers of Art), in partnership with Nick Cave Productions as a co-production with Le Festival International de Jazz de Montréal and evenko.

For more information on Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, visit nickcavemtl.com.