Coming Soon MAMbo + Museum - Shows
Concept by: Gianfranco Maraniello, Andrea Viliani
Exhibitions: Building Transmissions | Paolo Chiasera | Ryan Gander
Curated by : Andrea Viliani
Venues:Galleria dArte Moderna, Piazza Costituzione 3, Bologna
Padiglione Esprit Nouveau, Piazza Costituzione 11, Bologna
With the support of: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna
With the contribution of:British Council for the yan Gander exhibition
Flemish Authorities for the Building Transmissions exhibition
Press Conference: 29th March 2006, 12 a.m.
Opening: 30th March 2006, 7 p.m.
From – to: 31st March 14th May 2006
Opening times:Tuesday – Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Closed on Mondays
Entrance: free
With the three solo exhibitions of the Belgian collective Building Transmissions (Nico Dockx, 1974, Kris Delacourt, 1978, Peter Verwimp, 1974), Paolo Chiasera (Bologna, 1978) and Ryan Gander (Chester, 1976) the Galleria dArte Moderna of Bologna opens its 2006-2007 exhibition program entitled Coming Soon MAMbo: Museum Shows. This program will include in the next months the solo exhibitions of Ibon Aranberri, Adam Chodzko, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Trisha Donnelly, Wade Guyton & Kelley Walker, Seth Price, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Bojan Sarcevic and Markus Schinwald.
In answering the question about what todays museums are and what they are for – or what they are no longer for – these twelve projects will highlight possible new approaches in the contemporary artistic practice to the specific context represented by the institutional framework. In light of the competition from other forms of cultural entertainment which have come to the fore over recent decades, museums find themselves faced with the need to question and redefine their own format, their history and their ideology. In the contemporary museum’s arena, this dynamic context leads to the emergence of a more fluid entity, while more contradictory than in the past, it is also more imaginative, and perhaps even more self-ironic, able to mediate between the various needs and devices of production, exhibition, documentation and invention as well as between those of marketing and research. Museums will find their own ground in the in-between that these overlapping fields bring about.
Despite or perhaps thanks to the provocations of the historical avant-garde (spearheaded by Futurism and Dadaism), which proclaimed the museum to be a hostile entity worthy only of destruction, museums have become one of the milestones in the formulation of Modernist aesthetics. After that memorable era, between the 60s and 70s, in which institutional critique was to analyse (or deconstruct) every last aspect of the museum category, proposing even imaginary museums as valid alternatives (such as Marcel Broodthaers Musée des Aigles or Claes Oldenburgs Mouse Museum, or Harald Szseemanns Museum of Obsessions), today a new generation of artists, critics and curators is rising to the challenge to address the issue of the museums up-to-date/out-of-dateness. Given also the fact that over the last few years we have witnessed a huge increase of temporary exhibitions, biennials and time-based art events, a statement which calls for more museums and fewer shows is a clearly provocative one. It means expressing the need to keep the museum debate alive insofar as it is, or it could still be – a space-time by which to redefine and reconsider the actual feelings of contemporary art as a whole.
Coming Soon MAMbo: Museum Shows is a series of exhibitions and an opportunity for critical comment, a one-year long workshop with the purpose of conceiving and questioning a new museum.
In 2007, the Galleria dArte Moderna will move to a new venue, a historic building – the Forno del Pane – restored for that purpose over the period of more than a decade within the Manifattura delle Arti, the city of Bolognas new cultural centre. The museum will then adopt the new identity of MAMbo Museum of Modern Art of Bologna. The twelve solo exhibitions held in the context of Coming Soon MAMbo: Museum Shows will in fact accompany this imminent move and investigate its every aspect, offering a unique and unrepeatable event in the history of the institution, which provides a rare occasion to look at the museum from the inside in the particularly delicate moment of opening and self-analysis. This institutional metamorphosis will also allow to seize the almost utopian chance to reconsider, even to reinvent the museum from the outlook of the artists themselves.
Through these twelve proposals for the future museum it will be turned into a platform for public presentations as well as meetings and learning activities, which transform the shows thanks to the exchange of formation and information that will take place between the artists, the institution and the public. Conceived more flexibly than traditional exhibitions within the white cubes of the museum, these exhibitions will reflect a great range of possible points of view and propose a variety of creative solutions aimed at favouring not only a wider participation in the future planning of the museum, but also at stimulating a broader debate on the theme of the museum today and the ways in which it reflects and elaborates contemporary aesthetics and the other key issues of contemporary culture. The exhibitions will be documented by twelve ongoing publications published by MAMbo, which will include the interventions of internationally-renowned museum directors and curators as well as free-lance critics and art writers to outline the very nature of a possible institutional critique of second, or third generation that contemporary museums and art institutions seem to ask for.
Building Transmissions
www.buildingtransmissions.com
The project by the Belgian collective Building Transmissions, under the title www.buildingtransmission.com, calls for the creation of an inscrutable sound-area in the museum foyer. As happens with all buildings, this is the most crowded area of the whole museum, being host to a vast range of public services, from the reception area to the bookshop and museum cafeteria, which define the public identity of the building through their public services. Without performing any major modifications, Building Transmissions removes all these fundamental services from the entrance area, loading our first glance with a novel sense of tension, estranging it through the perception of something strange. The sound installation with which Building Transmissions entrusts this space is nothing less than an archive of various sounds recorded in ghost-buildings like the Galleria dArte Moderna of Bologna that in a few months will leave this building – sold to Bologna Fiere as a venue for trade fair events and will move to its new venue. We might define this space as frameless sound architecture, for it rejects the notion of structure in favour of that of transmission (of sound or data) and of flow (of information, of radio waves) that reflects or adapts with a de-architecturisation process – to the pending annihilation of the public identity of a purpose-built structure inaugurated in 1975 as the headquarters of the new Galleria dArte Moderna. In this progressive entropy, the museum space may be seen as a container of infinite alternative experiences, an ideal window open on a purely potential dimension.
Catalogue contributors: Building Transmissions, David Bussel, Elena Filipovic, Dirk Snauwaert, Andrea Viliani.
Paolo Chiasera
The Trilogy: CORNELIUS
The Italian artist Paolo Chiasera, whose work is based on the various expressions of contemporary myth as both a private and collective obsession and on the relationship between the meditative and active spheres, will here present the second chapter of his video trilogy dedicated to three great artists of the past: Vincent Van Gogh, Cornelius Escher and Pieter Brueghel. In the video CORNELIUS, the very first work produced by MAMbo, Chiasera wears both the mask and clothing of Cornelius Escher, as he crosses the mountain of wood created by the Austrian artist Hans Schabus for last years Venice Biennial (Das letze Land The Last Land, 2005), only to reappear within the white cube of the new museum in Bologna. An apparently circular and unproductive journey which serves to highlight both the physical and metaphorical space of the museum, just like the underlying double layer (based on trust/mistrust) on which the contemporary artist operates. The artist decides to show the process of the works development, almost step by step, inviting total public participation up to the point that the museum itself is transformed into his own studio. Here, he re-proposes his adventurous journey which from Mount Etna leads to the Po Plain and beyond, to the Antarctic before reaching the peak of the Cheope pyramid in Cairo in the near future.
Catalogue contributors: Ann Demeester, Jan Hoet, Andrea Viliani.
Ryan Gander
Nine Projects for the Pavilion de lEsprit Nouveau
Ryan Gander often creates invisible works, such as anonymous advertisments in newspapers, or areas which blur into the architectural context in which they are created. These are works that create fleeting narratives and give the sensation that the space is inhabited by people or influenced by stories yet unknown. A mystifier and a narrator of unlikely situations which are often confused with day to day life. When working in and around that historical and cultural hybrid known as the pavilion de lEsprit Nouveau in Bologna (1925 1977), Ryan Gander has adopted a creative and imaginative approach which right from the linguistic reconstruction of this building, designed by Le Corbusier and itself a symbol of the utopias of modernist functionalism, and going through its life events up until its reconstruction in Bologna in 1977 for the SAIE trade fair redeems his comments from being a mere act of gaining intellectual consciousness. The pavilion becomes, through Nine Projects for the Pavilion de lEsprit Nouveau not only in the internal rooms of the pavilion but also in the surrounding public park, a genuine time machine. This allows us to travel back and forth in time and space, from 1925 to 1977, only to return to the present (2006) and attempt a vertiginous leap into the future (to the year 2056). Thus the project has both a playful side while providing a declaration of intentions with regard to the museum institution and all that it should be able to conserve as well as imagine.
Catalogue contributors: Will Bradley, Charles Esche, Francesco Manacorda, François Piron, Andrea Viliani.
Dates of the upcoming exhibitions:
26th May 27th August 2006
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda
Seth Price
15th September 31st October 2006
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Trisha Donnelly
Simona Di Giovannantonio Press Office GAM Bologna
Tel. 051.502859 Fax 051.371032
UfficiostampaGAM@comune.bologna.it
