Joan Jonas
Light Time Tales
2 October 2014–1 February 2015
Opening: 1 October 2014
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Via Chiese 2
Milan
Hours: Thursday–Sunday 11am–11pm
Free admission
T +39 02 6611 1573
info [at] hangarbicocca.org
Light Time Tales, curated by Andrea Lissoni, will offer an insight into the constantly evolving artistic career of Joan Jonas. It includes ten installations and nine single-channel videos, bringing together Joan Jonas’s most important works for the first time in Italy. These range from the most historic, such as Mirage (1976/1994/2005) and Volcano Saga (1985/1994), through to the more recent Lines in the Sand (2002), Reanimation (2010/2012/2013) and others that have never been seen before in Europe, such as Double Lunar Rabbits (2010).The works are shown together with films and videos dating from the 1960s to the present day, including Beautiful Dog (2014) a new video specially created for the exhibition.
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York), one of the first female artists to combine video and performance, has since the 1960s explored the theme of identity and the relationship between the body and its representation, always avoiding any stereotyped image of herself. A great experimenter, always open to multi-disciplinary collaborations, Joan Jonas has deviced a personal artistic language that seamlessly interweaves video, installation and performance, creating a constant renewal of figurative art with formal solutions that have become a model for subsequent generations until the young artists of today.
The title of the exhibition refers both to the temporal aspects of the artist’s work, which is based on time and on light, on video and narration, as to the particular nature of Pirelli HangarBicocca: a vast space where the darkness welcomes the works like luminous time capsules with all their tales and potential stories. For the very first time Joan Jonas has conceived a unique display in which the works coexist together in one single space, allowing them to relate to each other, generating new perspectives. Moreover it emphasizes the cyclical nature of artist’s open-ended artistic research that is always in the making and never monolithic with themes and subjects that chase and renew each other.
On 21 October the artist will present Reanimation, a performance produced in collaboration with the musician and jazz composer Jason Moran offering visitors an opportunity to experience Joan Jonas’s intense performing tension.
Light Time Tales is part of the programme of exhibitions created by Vicente Todolí together with Andrea Lissoni. It is being presented in conjunction with Papagaio, a solo show by João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva (until 26 October). The Pirelli HangarBicocca calendar will continue with exhibitions by Céline Condorelli (December), Juan Muñoz (April 2015), Damián Ortega (June 2015) and Philippe Parreno (October 2015).
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