David Claerbout
26 October 2012–13 January 2013
Mart Rovereto
Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto
Corso Bettini 43, I-38068
Rovereto (TN), Italy
Curated by Saretto Cincinelli
The Mart—Museo di arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto—presents a conference dedicated to the David Claerbout exhibition, which runs until 13th January 2013.
The conference title is David Claerbout. Spacing time, and the debate can be followed live via twitter using the #claerbout hashtag from 5:30pm onwards.
After an introduction by the Mart’s Director, Cristiana Collu, the Mart’s curator, Denis Viva, will moderate the discussions of Saretto Cincinelli, the exhibition’s curator, Valentina Valentini, professor of performing arts and electronic and digital arts at the Università La Sapienza in Rome, Fernando Castro Flórez, professor of aesthetics and the theory of arts at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid and Philippe Dubois, professor of the theory of visual forms at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle de Paris III.
The exhibition currently running at the Mart is the first Italian one-man show dedicated to David Claerbout (b. 1969, Kortrijk, Belgium), and includes works like Rocking Chair (2003), and The American Room (2009–2010).
With these works, David Claerbout has established himself as one of the most acute investigators of the relationship that is created between time and the medium of film and photograph, Claerbout highlights not the time in the image but rather the “time of the image.” The artist literally places us in front of the material of perception, and this generates a series of paradoxes that disturb the spectator’s normal vision, inviting him to “open his eyes wider.” The images proposed by Claerbout bear strong witness to the potential of digital art with regard to opening new perceptive, aesthetic and conceptual horizons in contemporary vision. Through his works, we can understand to what extent the most recent technologies have made it possible to break through the visual categories of the last century, freeing the photographic from photography and the filmic from moving film.
Saretto Cincinelli, scholar, curator and art critic, focuses his research on the temporal dimension. He curated the first Italian one-man show of Mark Lewis at Museo Man, Nuoro and at Museo Marini, Florence. Over the years, he has worked with a number of specialised magazines, including Flash Art (Milan) and Ars Mediterranea (Barcelona). Among his publications are Tony Cragg formations and form, BSI Art Collection Zurich, 2006.
Fernando Castro Flórez has created many courses for Spanish universities and for the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. He has curated exhibitions in Spain and Latin America, including the Bienal del Fuego in Caracas and the Chilean Pavilion at the 2011 edition of the Venice Biennale.
Valentina Valentini has studied the performing arts and their reciprocal influences with the new media and technologies. Among her principal publications are Mondi, corpi, materie. Il teatro nel secondo Novecento (2007), monographs on Bill Viola and the Studio Azzurro and S.M. Ejzenötejn Quaderni e piani di regia (2003).
Philippe Dubois is editor of the Cinema & Cie studies periodical and, together with Jacques Aumont, is director of the Centre de Recherche en Esthétique du Cinéma et des Images at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle de Paris III. A leading scholar of cinema and its links with the other visual arts, among his fundamental books on the subject is L’acte photographique (1993).
