SILVER SUMMER PROGRAM
Rosa Barba
Stage Archive
28 May–28 August 2011
Opening:
27 May, 6–8 pm
Gerard Byrne
Loch Ness
Book launch and workshop (Educational Program: Trentoship-Trento.Link / Opera Civica (TN))
September 2011
Clemens Von Wedemeyer
The Repetition Festival Show
28 May–28 August 2011
Opening:
27 May, 6–8 pm
Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento
Via Cavour 19, 38122 Trento – Italy
T +39 0461 985511
F +39 0461 237033
www.fondazionegalleriacivica.tn.it
Rosa Barba: Stage Archive
Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento and MART-Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto are proud to present the first solo show by Rosa Barba (b. 1972, Agrigento) at a public institution in Italy. This double exhibition, curated by Andrea Viliani and Chiara Parisi, was developed as a counterpoint to Barba’s 2010 solo show at Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière. After focusing on the subject of space, the artist turns her attention to the subject of time and the instrument used to store and invent it: the archive, describing how the latter shapes the institutional identity and activity of contemporary museums and how time can be both an objective dimension and imaginary experience. The archive is reinterpreted by Barba as an engine driving the imagination and as a source of new narratives, becoming an unusual hybrid—a “stage archive,” a mechanical performance through which past and future are represented in the present time of the museum. The artist will transform unfinished or unproduced screenplays and film treatments by several Futurist artists into a “sculpture/theatricality/abstraction”. In both exhibition venues, the installation merging film and sound assumes the outlines of a Futurist-inspired ballet mécanique, comprising texts, film, sculptural objects and audio. At MART, the artist works with the central space of the museum, establishing a nexus between the archival area in the basement and the exhibition rooms on the higher levels. The archives, conventionally relegated to the shadows, here take the spotlight. The idea of stratification, from the realms of both archeology and science-fiction, is conveyed through the vertical structure of the exhibition. The historical documents develop their unrealized potential, two and three-dimensional objects translate the original projects entrusted to historical documents into a “film that doesn’t exist.” Among the other works (Theory in Order to Shed Light, 2011; No Titles, 2011), a massive circular sculpture (Stage Archive, 2011) re-evokes the shape of the large chandelier designed by Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera for the central hall of the Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol Regional Council building in Trento. Inside the sculpture, a strip of motion picture film rolls as if it were in a projector or on the cutting desk. Since it is not printed, all it produces is the sound of its futile winding. Yet as part of a specific mechanism, it seems to be looking for an image and a story to tell. It is the representation of an utopia, the unspoken, potential energy that characterized Futurist documents, which reverberates through the mental and narrative space of the museum in this exhibition. The two 35mm films Hidden Conference: About the Discontinuous History of Things We See and Don’t See (2010–11) are projected at Fondazione Galleria Civica. The Hidden Conference series grew out of Barba’s reflections (starting in 2010) on the works of art kept in storage at museums of ancient and modern sculpture. The artist weaves an imaginary dialogue among the works, in their silent, secret, everyday cohabitation with the institutional settings where they are kept. These films—in which the stored items are transformed into a scenic backdrop carved out of light, as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a stage or movie set—investigate the invisible links between the works of art and the network of connections that evoke the idea of a “protected” space outside time, similar to that of an archive. Though not in the public eye, the archives nevertheless help construct the identity of the museum, and thus the visual language developed in our interaction with it. The institutional possibilities suggested by the secret dimension of the archive are further explored by other recent works on view, including among others the 16mm films Private Tableaux (2010) and Let Me See It (2009), the sculptural installations Invisible Act (2010) and One Way Out (2009) as well as Optic Ocean (2011) and Time Machine (2007), two screenplays compiled on the walls of the exhibition space, which is transformed into a working document.
The brochure Printed Cinema 12 will be distributed free of charge during the show. By summer 2011, the first extensive monograph devoted to the artist will be co-published by MART, Fondazione Galleria Civica, Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière and Hatje Cantz, with new essays by Lynne Cooke, Elisabeth Lebovici, Francesco Manacorda, Raimundas Malasauskas, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Ian White.
Gerard Byrne: Loch Ness
“The map is not the territory” (Korzybski, 1931).
Co-produced by Fondazione Galleria Civica and Milton Keynes Gallery and released in September 2011, in conjunction with a workshop held as part of the Trentoship-Trento.link / Opera Civica (TN) educational program, the new artist’s book Gerard Byrne: Loch Ness refers to a project which Gerard Byrne (b. 1969, Dublin) has developed over a ten-year period. Starting in 2001, Byrne has made numerous expeditions to Loch Ness, generating a large amount of film footage and photographic material. Appropriating formal conventions from the history of Land Art that position landscape as the “other” of language, Byrne has compiled a series of works that employ Loch Ness as a signifier for the enigmatic, the unreadable. Using both the populist literature spawned by the Loch Ness legend and the footage and photographs from his visits as “found material”, Byrne has developed a project that is sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholy, and ultimately reflects the crisis of belief in the film and photographic image that has come about since the last heyday of Loch Ness interest in the 1970s.
“What is at stake in the topographical trope of Land Art?”
“What idea of ‘land’ was instrumental in such work, and what desire did that rhetorical image address?” “What happens when an art project about the Loch Ness myth cites archetypal Land Art as its precedent and template?”
In the spirit of that cartographic practice imagined by Borges, where the map in 1:1 scale displaces the territory it depicts, this publication will take the material Byrne has accumulated as the de facto terrain of the Loch Ness myth. Presenting itself as something of a posthumous field-guide to Byrne’s material, the publication will examine Byrne’s work as if it were itself a historical site—a site in which to deliberate on the ruins of a double myth: that of the monster, and of film and photography itself. As such, the various formats of film/photographic material and “anecdotal evidence” become themselves the Ur-ground, the locus of symbolic ‘reality’ within the publication; the object of textual meditation, reflection, and wild conjecture. Designed in collaboration with graphic designer Peter Maybury, the guide will be written by author Brian Dillon and edited by Anthony Spira and Andrea Viliani.
Clemens Von Wedemeyer: The Repetition Festival Show
The Repetition Festival Show is a retrospective of work by Clemens von Wedemeyer (b. 1974, Göttingen), that takes the unique form of a full-fledged film festival housed in the Foundation’s exhibit spaces, presenting four of the artist’s most celebrated film installations. The individual screenings, scheduled from May to August, will be rounded out with materials such as preparatory videos, posters, photographs, texts and promotional matter, and will be subtitled in Italian for the first time. Each film will be screened according to the following calendar:
28 May–26 June: Against Death, Interview, Found Footage, 2009
28 June–16 July: Otjesd & The Making of Otjesd, 2005
18 July–7 August: Occupation & The Making of Occupation, 2002
9 August–28 August: Von Gegenüber (From the Opposite Side), 2007
The exhibition is conceived as a vast, periodically changing installation-in-progress that visitors can keep coming back to see in new incarnations, hence the title of the project: The Repetition Festival Show. The artist transforms the museum into a movie theater, and at the same time, into a center for producing and thinking about film, an evocative space where it will also be possible to analyze and deconstruct the logic and mechanisms of classic cinema. The Repetition Festival Show is a solo exhibition whose experimental, hybrid approach reinterprets both the classic format of the video installation and that of the retrospective. The artist’s major films will be presented in rotation, a concept inspired by the film loops that characterize von Wedemeyer’s installation work. Imperceptible adaptations of the screens or projection equipment for different films and the constant shifts in the set-up, made to accommodate new documentary elements, become part of a constantly evolving project. Von Wedemeyer has conceived the installations for each of the major films so that they overlap to form a retrospective that grows and changes in the course of time.
Avoiding traditional narrative techniques, von Wedemeyer’s films are skillful orchestrations that mingle documented reality with narrative invention, unmasking the mechanisms behind traditional cinematic devices: his films are sometimes accompanied by a “making-of” that includes, as an integral part of the work, an analysis of the ideas behind it and an illustration of how it was constructed, allowing the viewer to enter into its logic. Von Wedemeyer thus reframes the aesthetic elements of classic cinema, taking an analytical approach. The boundary between fact and fiction, the relationship between film/work and viewer/audience, and the artwork’s transformation over the course of time are elements constantly explored in von Wedemeyer’s work, in which the room allowed for different possible interpretations demonstrates that the languages of cinema and the visual arts belong, in many ways, to a single sphere of investigation.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual (Italian/English) guide that will be distributed free of charge to all visitors, jointly published by Projects Arts Centre, Dublin and Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento. The Repetition Festival Show is a project conceived by Clemens von Wedemeyer and Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Arts at Projects Arts Centre, Dublin. The Repetition Festival Show at Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento, is curated by Andrea Viliani, Director, with Giulia Corradi, Assistant Curator.
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