Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi Per L’Arte EnterPrize, II edition
No Manifesto
May 15 - July 3, 2005
Opening: Saturday 14th of May at 6.30 p.m.
GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
Italy
T 39 (0)35 399528
F 39 (0)35 236962
Hours: Tuesday - Sunday 10:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m., Thursday 10:00 a.m.- 10:00 p.m., Closed Mondays
Free admission
www.gamec.it
curated by Andrea Viliani
artists:
Stefano Arienti
Massimo Grimaldi
Mike Nelson
Florian Pumhösl
Anri Sala
Richard Wright
GAMeC Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo is pleased to host the group show No Manifesto curated by Andrea Viliani, winner of the second edition of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per lArte EnterPrize. The project by Viliani, nominated by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella), has been submitted to the jury comprised by: Francesco Bonami (Manilow Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago), Lóránd Hegyi (Director of Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne) and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Director of GAMeC of Bergamo).
The Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per lArte EnterPrize is the first international competition dedicated to young curators under the age of 30, conceived to commemorate Lorenzo Bonaldi’s passion for art and collecting. Held on an annual basis, it was organized by GAMeC – Galleria dArte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, and funded by the Bonaldi family for the first time in 2003. It represents a unique sort of recognition, because it rewards the research of a young curator and his or her exhibition project. The purpose of this recognition is to highlight the significance of the key role recently assumed by curators on the international art scene, as well as encourage and support the talent of a young curator at an extremely critical stage in his or her professional development.
Within the context of current artistic practice, between a new modernist impulse and a persistent post-modern condition, No Manifesto explores the primary role assumed by the working artists simplest gestures: from the awareness of the specific space/time in which he/her acts to the unfolding of the vision, from the act of speech and hearing to suspension of judgment and speech itself, in order to open up to the experience of the imagination. Defined by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as means without a purpose, when these tools are not used in view of an external purpose, they allow the artist to reveal the potential and limits of his own language in the act of doing and, in the final analysis, comprehend artistic practice as an intimately and necessarily contradictory and mobile practice.
The exhibition which is comprised of a selection of works by Stefano Arienti, Massimo Grimaldi, Mike Nelson, Florian Pumhösl, Anri Sala, and Richard Wright that are being presented in Italy for the first time or executed specifically for No Manifesto is conceived as an opportunity to confront the activity of artists and that of curators, with both being interpreted as potential gestures in action and not as acts that are complete in and of themselves. Visitors are urged to become conscious of the specific space and time of the exhibition and of the way of doing and document our decisions and experiences, in a continuous process of reflection and transformation. Richard Wrights decision to stop painting canvases in his studio and instead paint directly on the surface of exhibition spaces (but there was no manifesto. One day I just didnt paint.) acts in this sense, starting with the very title chosen for the exhibition, offers a key indication of the experience that it aims to offer.
By alternating and fusing the artificial dimension of the exhibition and the multiple realities that can be evoked in it, the environmental installations of Mike Nelson and the video installations of Anri Sala recreate the scenarios of the external world inside the museum by inducing us to reflect on them and the subtle distinction between reality and the imagination, while works such as those by Florian Pumhösl and Massimo Grimaldi project into the social dimension of art and the analysis of historical and cultural dynamics the awareness of the impossibility of providing a unique definition for every human creation. In Stefano Arientis works as well, the mechanisms induced by the consumer society become the mean for an intimate process of recreation.
The six artists are elaborating a modern artistic experience; its modern in the sense that it seems to reacquire from modernity the potential spirit, with an awareness, however, that is fragmentary, temporary, dubitative, but also fabulatory in the lucid chiseling into possible tales of specific passions and every thought, detail or emotion. Its an experience permeated by the objective reality as well as by possible realities. No Manifesto is an attempt to exalt humanity, which seems innate to this experience.
The exhibition catalogue is presented in PDF format, constantly updated, and available for downloading on the Web site www.gamec.it In addition to the texts by the exhibition curator and by the American writer and artist David Robbins, the catalogue presents the projects of the other three finalists in the second edition of the Prize Thomas Boutoux, Giovanni Carmine and Mathieu Copeland a prototype game on the process underlying the formulation of a concept created by Lara Favaretto and a visual essay by the British artist Jeremy Deller, winner of the Turner Prize 2004.
