4 solo shows: Adam Chodzko, Eva Marisaldi, Diego Perrone, Bojan Sarcevic
December 2, 2007 – February 3, 2008
Via Don Minzoni 14
40121 Bologna
Italia
info [at] mambo-bologna.org
Adam Chodzko
M-path and Hole
Envisaged as “gateways”, “thresholds”, “passages” between different dimensions — past/present/future, reality/potentiality, documentary/fiction, public/private — Adam Chodzko’s works appear in fragmentary gestures spreading out from the exhibition site into the intangible sphere of our experiences, memories and intuitions. His interventions — installed both in the exhibition galleries and in the external area of the MAMbo premises — provide us with an opportunity to experience the museum as an entity moulded not only by its management but also by its outside, i.e. by the dynamic relationship between people and their reciprocal expectations. After being requested to enter the exhibition “in someone else’s shoes” (M-path, 2005-07), the visitor will encounter the video installation Hole (2007) which tells a legend set in the near future in which a local woman is bound to the museum by a hypothetical relationship fluctuating between complete identification and distrust. In giving birth to a possible mythical background for the new museum, Chodzko contributes to the formation of its collective identity, discovering and revealing the institution’s history at the very moment in which he invents it. By means of a mysterious short-circuit the remnants of that myth will be already visible on the rear façade of the museum. In this way the artist brings to light the foundations of an event which, though hypothetically destined to come about in the future, is the catalyser of a more pervasive and flexible definition of reality and of its artistic representations.
Curated by Andrea Viliani. Catalogue: texts by Alex Farquharson, Lisa Le Feuvre, Andrea Viliani and a conversation between Adam Chodzko and Mark Godfrey.
Eva Marisaldi
Jumps
Eva Marisaldi is interested in exploring creative and cognitive processes that, by being “lateral” to active life, make imagination real, suggest different logical and linguistic systems, open up alternatives of meaning that challenge the usual way of thinking and emerge as surprising though plausible possibilities. By involving the public in the encounter, rather than the use of her environments, the artist traces routes of discovery as in a “gym of attention”. In her exhibition at MAMbo Marisaldi premieres an installation composed of three new works, which will be fully revealed to the visitor only at the moment he/she comes face to face with them. The journey through these three works is like a “surmountable” obstacle course that constantly questions us the reasons for tackling the next obstacle, for having “left home” with its intensely mediatized life to enter a museum. Wooden and decorated constructions resembling equestrian hurdles, but done on human scale, will be spread out in the exhibition galleries to join an L-shaped plinth (like the Knight’s move in chess) and a small portable theatre for birthday parties installed at the end of that human-equestrian walkthrough. The show at MAMbo follows Marisaldi’s first show held at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna in 1999.
Curated by Roberto Daolio. Catalogue: text by Roberto Daolio, interviews with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist and the computer programme ‘George’.
Diego Perrone
La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza e la fusione della campana
Specifically conceived for the main gallery of the museum, the show by Diego Perrone comes to us as witness to a personal dimension within the public space of the museum. An invisible line — traced just by the sequence of three works placed on a ramp — runs up through the entire space. Taking no account of the pre-existing architecture of the museum these “three things in a line uphill” prompt the visitor to rethink his/her relationship to the exhibition space and suggest the possibility of remodelling forms and meanings autonomously. The Casting of the Bell (2007) is a translation into physical and spatial terms of the timely process of casting a bell. The video installation The First Daddy Spins around with His Own Shadow, the Mummy Bends Her Body Looking for a Form, the Second Daddy Hits the Ground with His Fits (2006) shows us three distinct forms in the very act of taking form before our eyes. Boccioni’s Mother in an Ambulance (2007) is an object existing in different versions and without any single defined sculptural form, in which the face of the mother of Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni is superimposed on an image downloaded from Internet and reworked on computer, showing a simulated emergency in an ambulance. By giving new life to that material, the artist envisages a cross between colliding images, forms and times, refashioned by yielding to the possibilities suggested by the potentialities afforded by the appropriation of present-day multi-authored technologies and practices.
Curated by Charlotte Laubard with Andrea Viliani. Catalogue: texts by Luca Cerizza, Massimiliano Gioni and a conversation between Diego Perrone, Charlotte Laubard and Andrea Viliani.
The exhibition is a co-production with CAPC-musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.
Bojan Sarcevic
Already Vanishing
Bojan Sarcevic explores open and ambiguous forms at the intersection between diverse modes of expression as well as between the various phases of the creative process and of our sensorial experience. To think of the cinema medium as a “sculpture” — as in this exhibition, which follows shows presented this year at the BQ gallery in Cologne and Le Crédac-Centre d’Art Contemporain in Ivry — means conferring to film a physical, concrete presence as to sculpture an ephemeral, impalpable consistence, highlighting the ‘liminal’ expressive possibilities of both film and sculpture. Sarcevic creates a progression marked by distinct pavilions — temporary and ethereal structures which are at the same time individual sculptural compositions, projection spaces and places which define the indissoluble relationship between the work and its architectural setting. In this disintegration of the dividing lines between different entities and media, the real space intersects reciprocally with the metaphorical and two-dimensional space of the projected image. Matter, form and structure are transposed into a intangible and immaterial dimension, while the solidity of the architecture opens up to the dynamism of the image in motion, the skilfully measured changes of sound, colour, light. The transitory nature of this intervention has crept into the tangibility of the museum building, while a scenario vacillating between invention, sensation and reflection takes on form in the here and now of the white cube.
Curated by Andrea Viliani. Catalogue: texts by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Marcus Steinweg and Andrea Viliani.
