New programming at GAMeC
Pratchaya Phinthong
give more than you take
27 May– 24 July 2011
ART IN THE AUDITORIUM
3rd Edition
Opening:
Thursday, 26 May 2011 at 6.30 pm
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo – Italy
T +39 035 270272
F +39 035 236962
www.gamec.it
give more than you take
27 May–24 July 2011
Curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Alessandro Rabottini
A collaboration between: CAC – Centre d’art contemporain, Brétigny and GAMeC, Bergamo
For the exhibition program Eldorado—dedicated to the most interesting emerging artists on the international scene—GAMeC presents give more than you take, the first solo show to be held at an Italian museum of the Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong (1974, lives and works in Bangkok).
The exhibition has been conceived in collaboration with CAC – Centre d’art contemporain, Brétigny, where it was held between December 2010 and February 2011.
The project changes radically each time it is staged, in a charged dialogue between the artist’s intentions and the local setting.
The starting point was the invitation extended to the artist by CAC Brétigny for a two-month residency in the suburbs of Paris. However, Phinthong decided to spend this period in Swedish Lapland, getting himself hired by a Bangkok-based company specializing in the export of seasonal labour for the cloudberry harvest in the vast Nordic forests. He wanted to gain first-hand experience with a trend being brought to public attention by both the Thai and Swedish press, i.e. the exploitation of seasonal workers by Thai middlemen and Swedish businesses alike.
At the end of each workday, Phinthong sent the curators a text message with the number of kilograms of cloudberries he had managed to pick, and they were asked to accumulate the exact same weight, but in objects from their local environments that no longer had any use value.
The ensuing work is entitled Tod tee sweden mend thung mor-chit (2010), which is the phonetic translation of Thai as used for karaoke to allow even those who do not speak the language to pronounce the verses of songs.
The artist asked to the exhibition curators to be directly responsible for the waste materials to be collected and how to organize them in the space.
In the case of the exhibition at GAMeC, the 549 kilograms of berries picked by the artist have been translated by Alessandro Rabottini into the equivalent amount of earth excavated for the foundation of the extension of the new Museum of the Carrara Academy, which is currently closed to the public for restoration and construction.
The second work on display takes the form of a website with the same title as the exhibition: www.givemorethanyoutake.net (2010–11), which includes the photographs and videos taken by the artist during his two-month stint as a seasonal worker. It was created by the design duo Vier5 based on the size of the files sent by Phinthong himself. This material is viewable on the Internet only until the end of the exhibition at GAMeC in Bergamo. At the end of this period, in fact, the site will disappear and its phantom—incorporated into the memory of the Internet—will be the only testimony of this work.
The title of the third work on show, Allemansrätten (2010), refers to the “Right of Public Access” that is part of Swedish law, i.e. the possibility for anyone to cross public and private natural spaces and pick wild flowers or berries. This right is accompanied by the duty to protect nature and wild animals as well as private property, and it originally had the merit of transcending the concept of property in order to promote freedom of movement and activity in the territory. Today, however, it is also an instrument through which local entrepreneurs are transforming natural resources as part of an industrialization process. Allemansrätten draws on the title of the law and perpetuates a practice of physical and symbolic movement. Appropriating one of the sighting towers built by the hunters of Lapland, the artist transformed its function to change it into an observation point for fruit pickers.
One night, with the help of several nomadic pickers, the artist dismantled the tower and sent it to CAC Brétigny, asking the curator to present it to the public however he saw fit. The curator of the GAMeC exhibition was asked to do the same thing.
The Bergamo exhibition is completed by a series of works that were not at Brétigny but that nevertheless contextualize this project within a larger corpus of works.
One of the most noteworthy is An Average Thai Berry Picker’s Income (2010), which—as its title suggests—corresponds to the exact sum of Swedish kronor that Phinthong earned in two months, net of taxes.
The exhibition is part of a series in honour of Arturo Toffetti.
With the support of:
gb agency, Paris
Iaspis, Stockholm
ART IN THE AUDITORIUM
3rd Edition
27 May–24 July 2011
GAMeC is pleased to present the third edition of Art in the Auditorium, a project created by the Whitechapel Gallery in London involving international institutions all over the world.
Each institution nominated an artist—or a group of artists—through a selection of works in which the use of moving images represents the key medium.
The selected artists and the nominating Institutions are:
Niles Atallah, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León (Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires)
Huang Xiaopeng (Para/Site Art Space, Sheung Wan – Hong Kong)
Giorgio Andreotta Calò (GAMeC, Bergamo)
Jalal Toufic (Beirut Art Center, Beirut)
Marthe Thorshaug (Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo)
Rachel Rakena (City Gallery Wellington, Wellington)
Stephen Sutcliffe (Whitechapel Gallery, London)
Kelly Nipper (Ballroom Marfa, Marfa)
Elodie Pong (Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich)
Ergin Cavusoglu (The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Istanbul)
Dinh Q. Lê (San Art, Ho Chi Minh City)
For further information: www.gamec.it
Exhibitions Press Office
CLP Relazioni Pubbliche – e-mail: press@clponline.it
GAMeC Press Office
Manuela Blasi – e-mail: manuela.blasi@gamec.it
