Fantasie Fluttuanti
a cura di
Giacomo Zaza
|
La mostra Fantasie
Fluttuanti nel Torrione Passari di Molfetta (Bari), si pone come ultima
tappa di un progetto di attenta analisi dell'arte contemporanea.
Il progetto è pensato in quattro tappe, una per anno, dal 2009 al 2012, che
intendono guardare al sincretismo di attitudini che attraversano l'arte
visiva, spinte al di là dei confini estetici e degli standard stilistici. Le
quattro mostre evidenziano la connotazione cangiante delle ricerche multimediali
e “intermediali”, inoltre evidenziano l'impiego della tecnologia per nuove
pratiche al confine con la realtà. Gli artisti invitati nel 2011 sono stati
Gianfranco Baruchello, Olga Chernysheva, Wolfgang Plöger, Grazia Toderi.
Mentre nel 2012 il Torrione Passari ospita una mostra dedicata alla frontiera
delle pratiche fluttuanti con artisti quali: Rä di Martino, Marius Engh,
Bjørn Melhus, Olaf Metzel, Thomas Zipp.
Tale progetto focalizza un tipo di fantasia che attraversa la “scena” polifonica del reale e del vissuto, quanto dell'utopico e del sognato, una fantasia contemporanea che, a detta di Adorno, potrebbe posizionarsi “nel mezzo” della coscienza e del linguaggio. Questa pratica fluttuante privilegia il dislocamento continuo da una sfera ad un'altra, mantenendo sempre fluente la creazione di scambi simbolici e di relazioni contestuali. |
FLOATING FANTASIES
Curated by Giacomo Zaza
RÄ DI MARTINO
MARIUS ENGH
BJØRN MELHUS
OLAF METZEL
THOMAS ZIPP
Torrione Passari Molfetta, Bari – opening September 29 at 7,00 p.m.
The
exhibition Floating Fantasies in Torrione Passari, in Molfetta (Bari), supported
by Comune di Molfetta, Regione Puglia and OCA (Office for Contemporary Art
Norway) is to be considered as the last stage of a project of contemporary
art. The project is planned in four stages, one a year, from 2009 to 2012,
which mean to look at aesthetic boundaries and stylistic standards. The four
exhibitions point out the changing connotation of multimedial and "intermedial"
searches, besides the use of technology for new practices bordering reality.
The artists invited in 2011 were Gianfranco Baruchello, Olga Chernysheva,
Wolfgang Plöger, Grazia Toderi. Whereas in 2012 Torrione Passari
houses an exhibition devoted to the frontier of floating practices with artists
such as Rä di Martino, Marius Engh, Bjørn Mehlus, Olaf Metzel, Thomas Zipp.
Such project concentrates on a type of fantasy which crosses the polyphonic "scene" both of reality and experienced life and utopia and dream, a contemporary "fantasy" which, according to Adorno, could be located "between" conscience and speech. This floating practice favours a continuous displacement from a sphere to another, keeping the creation of symbolic exchanges and contextual relations always flowing.
The fragmentation and proposition of well-known characters, media subjects and communicative strategies spread new interpretations and visual codes in Bjørn Mehlus. In the wake of Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman, Mehlus dwells on the absurd sides of cinema and television media. He knows well the lesson given by Nail Postman, according to which mass media affect our forms of social organization, our habits of mind, our political ideas. He thinks over the questions suggested by McLuhan on the social and cultural consequences of new communicative technology. New media create a background and change the way of thinking and living for the benefit of show-business and entertainment. Melhus's floating imagination has got a subtle irony and faces the week boundaries of reality, amidst amusement, dream, drama and passive consumption of information. Melhus tells tales about themes got out of cinema repertory, uses sound tracks or famous stars' voices. He deals with any role, even the role of a "puffo" in Happy Rebirth, 2004: a blue elf-like creature wishes a "happy rebirth" with a childish voice, over a background of whistles and shrill voices. Melhus's interest is about personal and collective identity, about our origin – where we are coming from and where we are going to – at the border between himself and media world, about the double, about the ambivalence between male and female. The video The Castle, 2007, is a trailer where reflections merge in, starting from the meaning of "residence" the castle can get. A sequence of words amplifies the texture of connections with ethic-cultural meanings and rules.
In Olaf Metzel' s artistic way, the use of press cuttings began late in the '80s, for example for the works Il Balletto della Crisi, 1988, and Il Messaggero, 1989. Sheets of newspapers, taken from dailies as well as from magazines, with subjects concerning news, culture and politics, are chosen and reutilized, in order to create some aluminium works reproducing "scrunched up" images on a large scale. Portraits, texts or press-cuttings seem to be in relief thanks to the use of aluminium sheets on which they are printed on both sides. His two famous works, Gaddafi and Pasolini, 2011, exhibited in Torrione Passari in Molfetta, are buckled, bulged and bended sheets, so that they seem to be huge papers to throw away. These works offer political and social hints, unsolved mysteries (Pasolini), and debatable lives (Gaddafi), real data and imaginary ideas. Metzel involves traditional "media", their flow of images and their transience, their store of subjects referred to every-day life. He puts together written traces and visual transitory documents which are put at the attention of the reader and disappear quickly to be thrown away. He holds the "trace" back, almost to suspend it before the last reading the "loss" of the subject. The contents of the works bind us longer than the simple reading of a newspaper: the wrinkled, twisted pages exist and last as prevailing reliefs. And, besides, Metzel compels the observer to think over the image and its story. Restposten, 1990, reproduces a concrete coat of arms of DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik – German Democratic Republic), the Socialist State of East Germany acting from 1949 to 1990, defined as a "worker political project". Here, the hammer (symbol of working people) and the compass (symbol of intellectual people), surrounded by two ears (symbol of farm workers) are considered as finds of an ideological "extinct" reality, already forgotten.
Marius Engh takes possession of the surrounding world, produces clones and gets new points of view concerning the "things" belonging to past experiences. Through the ri-creation of reality Engh investigates the spirit and the history things have got inside and tries to move them away from their starting context to express a tacit potential. An everyday object, passing into new circumstances, creates a different meaning, going from a historic value to a formal/poetic one, up to try out what is not visible and expressible. Marius Engh plans a group of works in relationship with Torrione Passari in the bounds of history, architecture and the use of a space as an art centre. For example, the work Moon arises from a Zen poem titled "No Water, No Moon", where you can read: "No more water in the pail! No more moon in the water!" A round aluminium container, which is black painted and full of water to the brim, with reference to the shape of the tower and to its initial use as a cistern of rainwater in the sea. The water surface will reflect the light, the artificial one and, perhaps, the night one of the moon. Whereas the work Napoleon Bonaparte, a series of five photos, refers to the night view of the Pont de Pierre in Bordeaux, the first bridge connecting the right and the left banks of the Garonne. The bridge was made to build by Napoleon in 1819. It was 500-metre long, with seventeen arches corresponding to the number of letters of the name Napoleon Bonaparte, a symbol of his supremacy and "empire". The photographic images show an infrastructure such as an indelible sign of power.
Thomas Zipp puts together different elements – paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, objects – to create a global environment integrating the spaces of the exhibition area. Zipp's work is a "dark phantasmagoria" fed by references to history, science and religion, to politics and society, to art and philosophy. He travels on divergent routes and meaning antagonisms. He penetrates into antithetical theme fields: good and evil, truth and lie, norm and deviation, body and mind, obsession and ecstasy, beatitude and sexuality, extreme experiences. Acting inside opposite poles, Zipp makes a kind of "self-exploration" which finds its best result in Kassel, in 2010, at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum turned into a mental hospital, "Mens sana in corpore sano" ("a sound mind in a sound body" – a quotation by Latin poet Giovenale's), a shady place whose rooms become "rooms of vision" full of concepts of philosophic, scientific, religious tradition. Luther's reforming positions are a part of the concept come out in the work of Zipp, for whom thinkers as "psycho-sailors" have changed their human condition and spread the (self) reflexive experience of knowledge.
Zipp's work includes an excess of hermetic papers, facts with dark satirical appearances, collages of texts and images, always inside a metamorphosis of meanings. The installation Theatre Technique (cercle: Gisela, Hansi, Irmgard) thought up for the round hall of Torrione Passari contains three anthropomorphic sculptures, Gisela, Hansi, Irgmard,, like human-sized conical dolls together with a central neon chandelier and a drawing made for the circumstance. The three spherical-based and manikin-headed figures can be "played": they swing and move as toys giving a sound similar to a click-clack, make up a playing-theatrical settlement with a visionary feature. Zipp wants to create an esoteric and formally "anarchist" scenery against the false "clearness" of the globalized world. A surreal, cryptic, grotesque environment. The artist always puts on a subtle symbiosis between well-known and strange, association and dissociation, evocation and cultural scoffing. He keeps a "noir" figuration and the user's gestural participation. A vision from unconsciousness where the view reaches the human scale and remains upset.
For Torrione Passari Rä di Martino exhibits some photographic works – No More Stars (star wars), 2011, and some unpublished photos of 2012 – made after an inspection on some cinema sets abandoned in various places of Tunisia and Morocco: for example the settlements of Tatooine of the scientific universe of Star Wars, ruins in the desert dunes. R? di Martino explores the idea of the landscape as a "double", emphasizing the persuasive power of images. In the desert of Morocco there was a continuous "visual distribution" for which different environmental and cultural contexts such as Ancient Egypt, Jerusalem(in the films "The Gladiator" of Ancient Rome or Jesus of Nazareth), New Mexico, Tibet (Kundum) were created. The awareness of this land follows a trajectory of visual and mental superimpositions, between the reality of the North African landscape and the cinema heritage settled in the collective memory. Inside the sets, abandoned and rearranged by Hollywood productions, the ancient ruins of the place are included in/contaminated by the scenic material left in situ. It follows a hybrid always changing vision, a crossing of reality and artificiality. The view of the Kasbah of Ait Ben Haddou in South Morocco is significant and it housed works of Land Art (the false sighting turrets, the alien structures of the set of Mos Espa,…). In accordance with his previous work, from Between to not360, the latest work of Rä di Martino works out contexts which are seemingly daily and real, but full of more than thirty films in its inside, being void of modern buildings. In photo works the visual distribution permits subtle references to "sui generis" alienations and disorientations, confusion and uncertainty, landscapes beyond analogy. The artist, through an obvious photo competence, shows the surreal face of Morocco furrowed by the presence of a Berber.
Curated by Giacomo Zaza
Opening September 29, 2012 at 7.00 p.m.
Torrione Passari, centro storico, Molfetta (Bari)
From September 29 to November 4, 2012
Every day opening time: 11.00/1.00 p.m.– 6.00/8.00 p.m.
Info Organization: @rtistika 340 4849912
Press and Communication office: Michela Casavola
Oderberger strasse 43 10435 Berlin
0049 0178 5615806 - 0039 347 4823583
Such project concentrates on a type of fantasy which crosses the polyphonic "scene" both of reality and experienced life and utopia and dream, a contemporary "fantasy" which, according to Adorno, could be located "between" conscience and speech. This floating practice favours a continuous displacement from a sphere to another, keeping the creation of symbolic exchanges and contextual relations always flowing.
The fragmentation and proposition of well-known characters, media subjects and communicative strategies spread new interpretations and visual codes in Bjørn Mehlus. In the wake of Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman, Mehlus dwells on the absurd sides of cinema and television media. He knows well the lesson given by Nail Postman, according to which mass media affect our forms of social organization, our habits of mind, our political ideas. He thinks over the questions suggested by McLuhan on the social and cultural consequences of new communicative technology. New media create a background and change the way of thinking and living for the benefit of show-business and entertainment. Melhus's floating imagination has got a subtle irony and faces the week boundaries of reality, amidst amusement, dream, drama and passive consumption of information. Melhus tells tales about themes got out of cinema repertory, uses sound tracks or famous stars' voices. He deals with any role, even the role of a "puffo" in Happy Rebirth, 2004: a blue elf-like creature wishes a "happy rebirth" with a childish voice, over a background of whistles and shrill voices. Melhus's interest is about personal and collective identity, about our origin – where we are coming from and where we are going to – at the border between himself and media world, about the double, about the ambivalence between male and female. The video The Castle, 2007, is a trailer where reflections merge in, starting from the meaning of "residence" the castle can get. A sequence of words amplifies the texture of connections with ethic-cultural meanings and rules.
In Olaf Metzel' s artistic way, the use of press cuttings began late in the '80s, for example for the works Il Balletto della Crisi, 1988, and Il Messaggero, 1989. Sheets of newspapers, taken from dailies as well as from magazines, with subjects concerning news, culture and politics, are chosen and reutilized, in order to create some aluminium works reproducing "scrunched up" images on a large scale. Portraits, texts or press-cuttings seem to be in relief thanks to the use of aluminium sheets on which they are printed on both sides. His two famous works, Gaddafi and Pasolini, 2011, exhibited in Torrione Passari in Molfetta, are buckled, bulged and bended sheets, so that they seem to be huge papers to throw away. These works offer political and social hints, unsolved mysteries (Pasolini), and debatable lives (Gaddafi), real data and imaginary ideas. Metzel involves traditional "media", their flow of images and their transience, their store of subjects referred to every-day life. He puts together written traces and visual transitory documents which are put at the attention of the reader and disappear quickly to be thrown away. He holds the "trace" back, almost to suspend it before the last reading the "loss" of the subject. The contents of the works bind us longer than the simple reading of a newspaper: the wrinkled, twisted pages exist and last as prevailing reliefs. And, besides, Metzel compels the observer to think over the image and its story. Restposten, 1990, reproduces a concrete coat of arms of DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik – German Democratic Republic), the Socialist State of East Germany acting from 1949 to 1990, defined as a "worker political project". Here, the hammer (symbol of working people) and the compass (symbol of intellectual people), surrounded by two ears (symbol of farm workers) are considered as finds of an ideological "extinct" reality, already forgotten.
Marius Engh takes possession of the surrounding world, produces clones and gets new points of view concerning the "things" belonging to past experiences. Through the ri-creation of reality Engh investigates the spirit and the history things have got inside and tries to move them away from their starting context to express a tacit potential. An everyday object, passing into new circumstances, creates a different meaning, going from a historic value to a formal/poetic one, up to try out what is not visible and expressible. Marius Engh plans a group of works in relationship with Torrione Passari in the bounds of history, architecture and the use of a space as an art centre. For example, the work Moon arises from a Zen poem titled "No Water, No Moon", where you can read: "No more water in the pail! No more moon in the water!" A round aluminium container, which is black painted and full of water to the brim, with reference to the shape of the tower and to its initial use as a cistern of rainwater in the sea. The water surface will reflect the light, the artificial one and, perhaps, the night one of the moon. Whereas the work Napoleon Bonaparte, a series of five photos, refers to the night view of the Pont de Pierre in Bordeaux, the first bridge connecting the right and the left banks of the Garonne. The bridge was made to build by Napoleon in 1819. It was 500-metre long, with seventeen arches corresponding to the number of letters of the name Napoleon Bonaparte, a symbol of his supremacy and "empire". The photographic images show an infrastructure such as an indelible sign of power.
Thomas Zipp puts together different elements – paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, objects – to create a global environment integrating the spaces of the exhibition area. Zipp's work is a "dark phantasmagoria" fed by references to history, science and religion, to politics and society, to art and philosophy. He travels on divergent routes and meaning antagonisms. He penetrates into antithetical theme fields: good and evil, truth and lie, norm and deviation, body and mind, obsession and ecstasy, beatitude and sexuality, extreme experiences. Acting inside opposite poles, Zipp makes a kind of "self-exploration" which finds its best result in Kassel, in 2010, at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum turned into a mental hospital, "Mens sana in corpore sano" ("a sound mind in a sound body" – a quotation by Latin poet Giovenale's), a shady place whose rooms become "rooms of vision" full of concepts of philosophic, scientific, religious tradition. Luther's reforming positions are a part of the concept come out in the work of Zipp, for whom thinkers as "psycho-sailors" have changed their human condition and spread the (self) reflexive experience of knowledge.
Zipp's work includes an excess of hermetic papers, facts with dark satirical appearances, collages of texts and images, always inside a metamorphosis of meanings. The installation Theatre Technique (cercle: Gisela, Hansi, Irmgard) thought up for the round hall of Torrione Passari contains three anthropomorphic sculptures, Gisela, Hansi, Irgmard,, like human-sized conical dolls together with a central neon chandelier and a drawing made for the circumstance. The three spherical-based and manikin-headed figures can be "played": they swing and move as toys giving a sound similar to a click-clack, make up a playing-theatrical settlement with a visionary feature. Zipp wants to create an esoteric and formally "anarchist" scenery against the false "clearness" of the globalized world. A surreal, cryptic, grotesque environment. The artist always puts on a subtle symbiosis between well-known and strange, association and dissociation, evocation and cultural scoffing. He keeps a "noir" figuration and the user's gestural participation. A vision from unconsciousness where the view reaches the human scale and remains upset.
For Torrione Passari Rä di Martino exhibits some photographic works – No More Stars (star wars), 2011, and some unpublished photos of 2012 – made after an inspection on some cinema sets abandoned in various places of Tunisia and Morocco: for example the settlements of Tatooine of the scientific universe of Star Wars, ruins in the desert dunes. R? di Martino explores the idea of the landscape as a "double", emphasizing the persuasive power of images. In the desert of Morocco there was a continuous "visual distribution" for which different environmental and cultural contexts such as Ancient Egypt, Jerusalem(in the films "The Gladiator" of Ancient Rome or Jesus of Nazareth), New Mexico, Tibet (Kundum) were created. The awareness of this land follows a trajectory of visual and mental superimpositions, between the reality of the North African landscape and the cinema heritage settled in the collective memory. Inside the sets, abandoned and rearranged by Hollywood productions, the ancient ruins of the place are included in/contaminated by the scenic material left in situ. It follows a hybrid always changing vision, a crossing of reality and artificiality. The view of the Kasbah of Ait Ben Haddou in South Morocco is significant and it housed works of Land Art (the false sighting turrets, the alien structures of the set of Mos Espa,…). In accordance with his previous work, from Between to not360, the latest work of Rä di Martino works out contexts which are seemingly daily and real, but full of more than thirty films in its inside, being void of modern buildings. In photo works the visual distribution permits subtle references to "sui generis" alienations and disorientations, confusion and uncertainty, landscapes beyond analogy. The artist, through an obvious photo competence, shows the surreal face of Morocco furrowed by the presence of a Berber.
Curated by Giacomo Zaza
Opening September 29, 2012 at 7.00 p.m.
Torrione Passari, centro storico, Molfetta (Bari)
From September 29 to November 4, 2012
Every day opening time: 11.00/1.00 p.m.– 6.00/8.00 p.m.
Info Organization: @rtistika 340 4849912
Press and Communication office: Michela Casavola
Oderberger strasse 43 10435 Berlin
0049 0178 5615806 - 0039 347 4823583
Fonte e maggiori info: http://www.torrionepassari.it/
Segnala:
Amalia Di Lanno
