Bergamo 24121
Italy
GAMeC presents two new exhibitions to the public: the installation conceived by Anri Sala for Palazzo della Ragione and the anthological exhibition devoted to Christian Frosi.
What’s more, the Radio GAMeC 30 project will continue, recounting the last 30 years of history through a selection of events, read and interpreted by the voices of international artists.
Anri Sala: Transfigured
June 10–October 16, 2022
For the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, Anri Sala (Tirana, 1974) has created a thoughtful dialogue with the iconic Sala delle Capriate based on his most recent film and sound installation: Time No Longer.
Projected onto a 16-meter long suspended screen, Time No Longer focuses on the image of a record player floating in a space station. Anchored only to the electrical power cable, the turntable plays a new arrangement of Quartet for the End of Time by French musician Olivier Messiaen, considered to be his most famous musical work, created in captivity.
The dimension of solitude and constraint of the composition is echoed by the story of Ronald McNair’s saxophone. In 1986, McNair, one of the first black astronauts to reach space and a professional saxophonist, planned to play and record a solo on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. This would have been the first original piece of music recorded in space had the spacecraft not disintegrated just seconds after liftoff, tragically killing all the astronauts on board.
The suspended film and the darkness of the Sala delle Capriate evoke the absence of light and gravity in the universe. The darkness is interrupted at times by flashes of light which, following the rhythm of the music, illuminate the room and, along with it, the paintings and frescoes on the walls. The figures portrayed thus testify to a humanity that exists no more, linking various timeframes, crossing past, present, and future.
On the occasion of the Anri Sala exhibition, the first volume of a new series of essays will be published by NERO and GAMeC, linked to the exhibition projects staged at Palazzo della Ragione. The author of the first essay will be the French philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy.
Curators: Lorenzo Giusti, Sara Fumagalli
Christian Frosi: La Stanza Vuota
June 10–September 25, 2022
Ten years after his withdrawing from the art world, GAMeC presents the first anthological exhibition dedicated to the work of Christian Frosi (Milan, 1973).
The show brings together over 30 works, produced in a little over ten years of activity, describing the sense of transience: a constant element in his artistic production. It includes works that have become iconic and other lesser known works, all articulated according to principles of precariousness, fleetingness, and evanescence, which also characterized the artist’s early career.
The decision to focus on Frosi, after almost ten years of silence and inaccessibility, stems first of all from the need to remember, protect and preserve his work so that we can continue to observe, contextualize, and perhaps better understand the artist. The second reason lies in the will to interpret his invisibility in the light of an artistic and social present in which one is always called upon to be there, in which silence is an increasingly impervious and rare choice.
Observing these practices helps us to understand the countless nuances that disappearance and emptiness may take on in art, which in the case of Christian Frosi find compensation in his enigmatic and transient production.
La Stanza Vuota is accompanied by a publication, published by Lenz Press and GAMeC.
Curator: Nicola Ricciardi
Radio GAMeC 30
Until December, 2022
Alongside the exhibition program, the new season of Radio GAMeC will continue, dedicated to institution’s 30th anniversary. In keeping with the dialogue-based identity that has always characterized it, it will serve as an observatory over the changes that have shaped the last three decades of history.
Starting from the point of view of international artists, Radio GAMeC 30 proposes a journey in stages, guided by director Lorenzo Giusti and curator Ilaria Gianni.
The first podcasts focused on The Birth of the World Wide Web (1991), with Olia Lialina; The Rise of the No-Global Movement (1999), with Thomas Hirschhorn; The Cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1996), with Eduardo Kac; The Border Wall between Mexico and the United States (1993), with Héctor Zamora; Black Lives Matter (2013), with Kandis Williams, and EU Guidelines on Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (2019), with Lynn Hershman Leeson. Guests of the upcoming episodes include Chto Delat on The Russian “March of Millions” (2012), Dineo Seshee Bopape on The End of Apartheid (1994), and Stefanos Tsivopoulos on The Greek Debt Crisis (2015).
Podcasts are available from the GAMeC website and via social media channels.
