Highlights 2013 – Barbara Casavecchia

By Barbara Casavecchia

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Pays Barbare, 2013 (Prod. Les Films d'Ici)

Film and video

In the official era of Accelerationism, I guess I’ve grown to crave, more and more, the slow pace of cinema. This last year was generous with me.

Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Pays Barbare, 2013

Pays Barbare (2013) by Milan-based duo Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian premiered at Locarno Film Festival, after years of manic editing. Based on found footage and photos, it opens onto unseen images of the dead body of Mussolini in Piazzale Loreto among the disconcerting smiles of a cheering crowd, and then reconstructs the planned brutality of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia. A film about the present, despite the archival framework.

Dora Garcia, The Joycean Society (2013). Since thirty years, the members of Zurich’s Joycean Society read together Finnegans Wake, discussing every word; once they are done, they start all over again, thus echoing the circularity and endless interpretations of the book. Live, human, oral, subversive Encyclopaedic Palaces to get lost in.

Michel Auder’sStories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs at Kunsthalle Basel provided a full immersion. I’ve forgotten the title of Auder’s latest film I saw at the nearby Stadt Kino during the Art Basel days: very small crowd, lots of beauty, masterly editing, sampling, cutting, pasting and quitting, over and over again.

John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation (2012), that I saw at the Sharjah Biennale. On three screens, the story of Stuart Hall, unfolding along a brilliant reflection on the formation of (personal, political, social) identities and subjectivities. And what an amazing soundtrack!

Alberi (Trees, 2013), by Milanese filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino started its tour as an installation at PS1 in New York in spring, to arrive in Milan at ex-Cinema Manzoni (as part of the FilmMaker festival) only in late November. Shot in a small village in Basilicata, Southern Italy, it brings back the myth of the Green Man from ancestral times, blending together humans and nature.

As many others here, I’ve enjoyed the artist films and video brought to my screen by Vdrome (an online platform of screenings curated by Edoardo Bonaspetti, Jens Hoffmann, Andrea Lissoni and Filipa Ramos). Andrea Lissoni has just been appointed as Film and International Art Curator of Tate Modern, so please stay tuned.

Something to read

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Raffaella Perna, Arte, Fotografia e femminismo in Italia negli anni Settanta, (postmedia books, 2013). Italian only, sorry guys, but one could buy it just for the pictures: a small book on photography, feminism and the conflicted, corrosive representations of the female body in the 1970s. Bad girls’ irony rules.
I’m looking forward to postmedia’s reprint of Service: A Trilogy on Colonization by Martha Rosler, three short stories on food production and consumption. More Semiotics of the Kitchen, please.

Two thoughtful books on art, communities and relational dynamics, great to tackle together: Anna Detheridge, Scultori della speranza. L’arte nel contesto della globalizzazione (2012) and Chantal Pontbriand, The Contemporary, the Common. Art in a Globalizing World (Sternberg Press, 2013).
A fascinating essay on the history of distraction. Petra Löffler, Bodies of Distraction, in: Bianca Maria Pirani, Thomas S. Smith, Body and Time: Bodily Rhythms and Social Synchronism in the Digital Media Society (2013, Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

The thick book accompanying the much disputed When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013 (Prada Arte, 2013) is a goldmine, with hundreds of documentary photos and essays on Szeemann’s legendary exhibition, the readymade and the current vogue of re-enactments by Germano Celant, Dieter Roelstraete, Claire Bishop, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Francesco Stocchi, Boris Groys, Mary Anne Staniszewski, Charles Esche, Christian Rattemeyer, Anne Rorimer, Jen Hoffman, Benjamin Buchloch, Gwen Allen, Chus Martinez, Terry Smith, Jan Verwoert and Glenn Philipps. Positively heavyweight.

Exhibitions

Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Massimiliano Gioni’s pièce de résistance at this year’s Venice Biennale kept resurfacing in so many ways, both good and bad, that it’s still very much alive in my head, with Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen (2013) and Sharon Hayes’ Ricerche: three (2013) at the forefront as subtle forms of resistance to the seduction of the new.

Many of my favorite solo shows (or individual works), this year, were by women artists. My sincere apologies for the dumb reductionism, and all my thanks to Leonor Antunes, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Baga, Petra Cortright, Thea Djordjadze, Aleksandra Domanovic, Isa Genzken, Camille Henrot, Judith Hopf, Helen Marten, Marisa Merz, Giulia Piscitelli, Samara Scott, Marinella Senatore, Lorna Simpson, Jo Spence, Sturtevant for the experience.

For the enthralling play of words and objects: Pavel Buchler’sNo Returns at Vistamare gallery in Pescara (special mention for Parole on Probation [parole means ‘words’ in Italian], a print from the series Honest Work [2013]) and Shimabuku’sSomething That Floats, Something That Sinks at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Some Italian notes

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Diego Perrone’s twin monumental sculptures in cast glass for his show Il servo astuto (2013) at Museion in Bozen, half abstract and liquid, half anthropomorphic and solid, were a tactile feast.

Two solo shows by Nicola Martini proved the maturity of his formal explorations on the nature of materials – cast glass, colophony, marble and concrete, in Nervo Vago at Museo Marino Marini in Florence; cast glass and photosensitive bitumen of Judea at gallery Kaufmann Repetto in Milan. In both cases, borders between sculpture and architecture were uncertain.

In Antigrazioso, the section curated by Luca Lo Pinto at Palais de Tokyo in Paris for the massive group show Nouvelles Vagues, Tupac’s hologram and the photos of Medardo Rosso made a hell of a (ghostly) couple.

Boy With a Bucket by Andrea Kvas at Gallery Chert, Berlin: painting as a foldable, unfoldable, mobile, palpable and reckless presence inside the space.

Looking forward to Micol Assaël’s unpronounceable ILIOKATAKINIOMUMASTILOPSARODIMAKOPIOTITA at Hangar Bicocca in Milan and a lu tiempo de… by Pádraig Timoney at Museo MADRE in Naples, next February.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.