Blackout
Nosadella.due – 6:30 pm
Via Nosadella 2, Bologna
info [at] nosadelladue.com
+39 339 8751134
neon-campobase – 9:30 pm
Via Zanardi 2/5, Bologna
info [at] neoncampobase.com
+39 051 5877068
Nosadella.due
Residency for artists and critics in Bologna
presents the two artists in residence
NICO DOCKX
in collaboration with MAMbo/neon-campobase
invited by Andrea Viliani
and
ANDREAS GOLINSKI
invited by Daniela Cascella
on show from January 25 to February 23, 2008
January 25 opening
On Friday January 25 Nosadella.due presents the two artists selected for its fall program of residencies, Nico Dockx (B) and Andreas Golinski (D), inaugurating Blackout, an exhibition curated by Elisa Del Prete – artistic director of Nosadella.due – that brings together the work carried out by the two artists during their stay in Bologna.
The exhibition will continue until February 23, 2008, on the premises of Nosadella.due, a residence for foreign artists, critics and curators based in Bologna that offers itself as a vehicle for artistic production and a workspace in which to share and discuss methodologies, projects and processes of production and thought.
The invitation made to Nico Dockx, selected by Andrea Viliani, in turn invited by Nosadella.due as curator of MAMbo, has given rise to an unprecedented project of collaboration, a joint convergence on a single mode of action, however temporary and occasional, between entities as different as Nosadella.due, MAMbo (Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna) and neon-campobase, the historic Bolognese platform for artistic experimentation.
MAMbo – the only museum in Bologna devoted to contemporary art – has made itself the catalyst for a confrontation between different aspects of the city’s art scene. neon>campobase and Nosadella.due, which have handled the production phase of Dockx’s work in parallel, are hosting in their venues the dual project through time & today, the outcome of the artist’s research in Bologna.
Nico Dockx’s project is a further development of the work that the artist has been carrying out for almost ten years on the assembly of an archive of his own life, a “kinetic instrument for communication and connecting with the ‘other,’ a mixture of many different private constellations and personal uncanny alchemies.” A work that investigates the impossibility of arriving at a unique and definitive solution for the interpretation of events which spring from a complex tangle of situations, dialogues, images, relationships, exchanges and points
of view.
At neon-campobase Dockx presents a triple version of the video through time & today – the definitive version of a video already shown, the one previously discarded and the new version that reveals the original process of shooting – in which three different but equally possible approaches to narration are outlined, suggesting through the simple passing of time the impossibility of a definitive codification. For Nosadella.due, through time & today is enriched by the experience of his two months’ stay in Bologna and is transformed into an artist’s book, created in collaboration with Belgian writer and artist Helena Sidiropoulus, that illustrates a twofold and divergent reading of the same documentary materials, belonging to a common time but necessarily to different perceptions and interpretations. Douglas Park’s reading at the opening will provide a vocal, and therefore yet another, interpretation of these documents. Complementary to the presentation of the book, a collection of images from the same archive, selected and arranged by the two artists on the basis of two different approaches, will be projected in the private space of Nosadella.due, which will be shared with the public during the exhibition. On the outside of the building a childish scribble, found in the same archive, becomes a luminous sign, a written page on and facing the city.
The project by Andreas Golinski, the German artist selected by Daniela Cascella, a journalist and independent curator from Rome, confirms the common root of the research carried out by the two artists in residence. In fact memory is developed as a guiding thread, transforming and reinterpreting the spaces of Nosadella.due.
Starting out from an approach to memory as a dilemma between the necessity of recalling and the need to forget, Golinski brings events forgotten by the collective memory back to light. His is an investigation that, through installations able to involve every one of the visitor’s senses, deepens the individual’s degrees of awareness of what he or she experiences, hears and knows.
Drawing on a recent novel by Adriano Prosperi, Dare l’anima. Storia of un infanticidio, which tells the true story of Lucia Cremonini, a young woman executed in papal Bologna in 1709 for the killing of her newborn child, the artist tackles a forgotten past that, at the same time, prompts us to take a new look at a condition and an experience of great topicality. Yet the evocation of the historical drama is made without any narrative intent. Rather it uses suggestions with a strong impact that, as in the monolithic installation on display, are capable above all of arousing states of mind. Making their way through the disquieting atmosphere of dimly lit rooms, visitors find themselves in the dark, amidst impressions of a story that is never revealed.
Through this re-activation of a certain consciousness of and sense of responsibility for facts that tend to melt away and fade from our minds in order to make room for others, which pour into them relentlessly, the artist also reflects on the current modes and strategies of mass-media communication in relation to the long time spans of memory and narration.
