Rest Your Eyes
December 10, 2021–January 7, 2022
Mazzoleni is pleased to announce Rest Your Eyes by Italian artist Rebecca Moccia, an exhibition by the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels, in collaboration with MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna. The show will be on display at IIC Brussels from December 10, 2021 to January 7, 2022.
The project is among the winners of Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, an open call supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and the Ministry of Culture (MiC) that was launched in September 2020 with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art abroad.
Rest Your Eyes is a transmedia installation featuring a news broadcast on mute, as well as two audio speakers located throughout the space and connected to multi-language web radio stations. Disturbing yet familiar like the distant and distorted chronicles coming from the speakers, the images have been blurred and made unrecognisable through a digital filter created by the artist.
“Some artworks offer themselves as theoretical places. Rest Your Eyes is one of them and interpellates the viewer right from its title. The invitation to ‘rest your eyes’ is not meant to impose a sensory deprivation, yet to review the privilege that images and the gaze have always had in Western culture.” Through a constant visual tension given by the attempt to distinguish shapes and narratives, the artist investigates the “infodemic that tires the eye and pollutes the mind, but also a new dimension of public intimacy”, states Annalisa Pellino, author of the critical text that accompanies the exhibition.
In her research, Rebecca Moccia explores the materiality of perceptual and emotional states that can arise from certain features of physical and social spaces. She creates context-specific works defined as “media atmospheres“ that surround the body, but also cross and interact with it. In Rest Your Eyes, “as a reaction to the de-materialisation of the Self and of the Other, which has characterised our perception of the world in the last two years, Moccia places materiality back at the centre of human relationships,” considering the installation as “a liminal space of transition, where a polyphony of voices transforms the surface of the image, reverberates in space, and excites the human soul”.
On Saturday, December 11, 2021, on the occasion of the 17th edition of the Giornata del Contemporaneo promoted by the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums (AMACI), it will be possible to access an online preview of the exhibition on both the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels and Mazzoleni’s website.
See more information and download the Press Kit of the exhibition here.
Hours: Monday–Friday 9:30am–1pm & 2–5pm
*Image above: Rebecca Moccia, Rest Your Eyes, 2021. Projection, filter, speakers, dimension variable, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Istituzione Bologna Musei / MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Stefano Colonna. Winner of the public call “Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere”, “Under 35 Section” promoted by MAECI-DGSP and MiC-DGCC, 2020.
