Program 2018

The 2018 ar/ge kunst program continues to support on-going and long-term research by emerging and mid-career artists and collectives through a series of new productions and commissions.

This annual program articulates a discourse around artistic practices that investigate the tensions between identity politics and processes of hybridization, always starting from trans-historical perspectives and in favor of non-Eurocentric modes of thought.

Its core is composed of four exhibition projects, each intertwined with its own public program including lectures, workshops, and performances. Some of these events will be organized collaboratively with close and faraway institutions, which will be announced with each new project.

The exhibition It’s Just Not Cricket by Milan-based artist and architect Matilde Cassani (February 23–May 5, 2018) concludes the third episode of the ar/ge kunst residency program, co-commissioned this year with Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, where the exhibition opens on May 24, 2018. The residency has led Cassani to develop new research in the macro-region straddling the Italo-Austrian border, a territory that the artist has explored through the English sport of cricket, a recent import to the region from the British colonies; a circular history that offers respite from the usual rhetoric of identity, borders, and the north–south divide.

May 18 will see the inauguration of Kirchgängerbanger, the first Italian solo exhibition by Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars, who for the last ten years have defined themselves and operated as "a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia." Through an installation conceived for ar/ge kunst, the exhibition presents current research by Slavs and Tatars on the figure of Johann Georg Hamann, philosopher of the German Counter-Enlightenment.

In parallel with the exhibition, a series of lecture-performance by Slavs and Tatars is being co-organized by ar/ge kunst and Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, Faculty of Design and Art (May 18, 2018), OGR You Torino (May 22, 2018), and Liveworks/Centrale Fies (July 19, 2018).

In autumn the dialogue between ar/ge kunst and the Franco-Italian collective Islands Songs (Nicolas Perret & Silvia Ploner) follows on from their September 2017 exhibition in collaboration with Transart festival. On this second occasion (Septemebr 7–November 10, 2018), Islands Songs explore sound as a means of interaction between microbes and human beings. By bringing into dialogue the knowledge and practices of Amerindian shamans and perspectives from biosemiotics, microbiology, and biodynamic agriculture, the artists aim to question notions of stable personhood, identity, objectivity, rationality, and truth as considered in Western thought.

The last exhibition of 2018 (opens on November 23) will see the return of Brussels-based Nigerian artist, Otobong Nkanga, following her participation in Emanuele Guidi’s opening program at ar/ge kunst, Prologue Part II – La Mia Scuola di Architettura (November 2013). With her first Italian solo exhibition, Otobong Nkanga will continue her recent work on neo-colonial relations between community, landscape, and raw materials with an installation encompassing sculpture, painting, and performance.

The format of public presentations in La Mia Scuola di Architettura (initiated 2013) will continue this year with speakers invited by three guest curators: Frida Carazzato, Museion (Bolzano); Simone Mair, ar/ge kunst / BAU (Bolzano); and Nina Tabassomi, Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol (Innsbruck).

ar/ge kunst would like to take this opportunity to announce that Simone Mair recently joined the team as Curator of Public Program and Mediation.

The program is curated by Artistic Director Emanuele Guidi.

The program is made possible thanks to support from the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, Department of Culture, the Autonomous Region of Trentino-Alto Adige, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, and the City of Bolzano, Department of Culture.
 

For more information and updates email info@argekunst.it