Venice
– Giudecca: The Immigrants exhibition: Experiment 2. Venice. The artistic project The Immigrants, created
by Federico Luger, in collaboration with the galleries GhostArt, Studio La
Città, Le Case d'Arte, PrometeoGallery, until July 15, takes this word as a
point of departure, it starts exactly in this universe of sense that in a few
letters delimitates a territory, as a frontier, and at the same time, it
suggests a world-other, like a dream. The
title "The Immigrants" contains in a few words the invitation to a
journey, to imagine a future, the promise of an imagined or imaginary land, the
occasion to leave behind the socio-political borders and, may be, the
invitation to wear a different mental habitus. In this experiment, a group show
brings together artists belonging to different generations and nationalities at
the Giudecca Island, a historic and popular neighborhood in Venice, creating a
sort of terminal, an exchange station in which diverse experiences and visions
intertwine, exactly as it happened in harbors over the centuries.
Above.
Two of the gallerists of the exhibition, its creator Federico Luger and Le
Case d’Arte’s Pasquale Leccese.
The
Immigrants exhibition. Radhika Khimji.
Radhika Khimji’s work questions
postcolonial discourse, hierarchies in society and violence against women. The
work is informed primarily by a making process, which leads to installations
and drawings. The surfaces of her work are platforms upon which she
addresses her political and personal concerns, a complex ground sometimes auto
biographical and sometimes abstract. There is a certain melancholia for a
historic place, a search for a future place, where the shifts between the
different temporalities of drawing, sculpture and stitching create gaps and
slippages to manifest a discontinuity between places and things. Splices
of memories and identities.
The
Immigrants exhibition. Franklin Evans. In this exhibition, Evans moves
forward and expands his research on the topic of time and its repetition,
already present in his previous shows. The installation, composed by paintings
and architectonical modulations realized with colored tapes, includes for the
first time also photography. Time, memory and the visual material blend in one piece, making evident the
constant and non-linear feedback among them. In Evans' elaboration, the
image-curtain becomes a structure, an architectonical experience that guides
the viewer through a virtual environment.
The
Immigrants exhibition. Luca Pozzi. Luca
Pozzi presents a piece that is clue for his oeuvre, Wall String (2013).
The Wall String is a pictorial system in seven dimensions (SU7) composed
by 49 aluminum folded bars. The polarity of each one of the bars is remotely
connected through the magnetic attraction of two colored ping-pong balls. In continuity with Pozzi's research on
physics, in particular on Quantum Gravity and T.o.E (Theory of Everything:
String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity and Noncom mutative Geometry), the discrete
pattern that arises linking these 98 points suspended in the void represents a
hypothetical gravitational field, as some of the contemporary quantum theories
have suggested.
The
Immigrants exhibition. Traslochi Emotivi (independent production house
founded by Giulia Currà in 2010). The video Kabul-Roma Roma-Kabul (2010) shows the friendship, and the
artistic and professional collaboration between Salmon Alì and Alighiero
Boetti. Alì tells about the encounter with Boetti in Kabul at the beginning of
the seventies, and from 1975 on, invited by Boetti, of his move to Rome, where
he will work side by side with the artist for all his life, as a kind of alter
ego. In the photograph Giulia Curra.
The
Immigrants exhibition.
Santiago Sierra. Santiago Serra is one of the best-known
artists of the international artistic scene. He has shown his work in important
museums and institutions. The works featured in this exhibition are part of the
series Pigs Devouring the Hellenic,
Italic and Iberian Peninsulas. These images are the result of a series
of performances which begun in 2012 in Hamburg, where the pigs had
"devoured" the Hellenic Peninsula; then in Luca, the Italic
Peninsula; and finally in Milan, the Iberian Peninsula. Sierra is using a clear
metaphor to denounce that the European financial entities are literally eating
real territories.
The
Immigrants exhibition. Gianni Pettena.
Gianni Pettena has been a very active artist in the US during the Sixties and
Seventies within the Land Art movement, and in Italy within the movement
Architettura Radicale. In this sense, his works using photography, as a medium,
are not those of a "photographer", but more likely, those of the
artist who uses photography to take notes, as outlines that would later
influence his research on landscape and architecture. In this exhibition,
eleven photographs from the series Wandering Through-USA 1971-73. The
Curious Mr. Pettena are featured. This series of photographs has been
intentionally left as a notebook, as artist's sketches and not as finalized
works; that is why they are "dirty", there is no retouch, or cleaning
of the image. Using a Nikon F 50, which does not deform the subject in any way,
Pettena's photographs later influenced several of his own projects. They have
been conserved and shown in the same condition in which gallerist Federico
Luger found them by chance in the artist's studio while working together for
his show at the gallery.
Ambra Medda