By Barbara Casavecchia
Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire (1969). © Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin
‘If we show you napalm burns you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context,’
*says Harun Farocki in the opening sequence of Inextinguishable Fire (1969), his first film, before stubbing a cigarette out on his own arm to demonstrate the effects of high temperatures on our skin. I saw it after reading Hito Steyerl’s moving piece of ‘fan prose’, as she called it, ‘Beginnings: Harun Farocki 1944-2014’, on e-flux journal, after his passing away. It was a powerful beginning indeed, and a perfect introduction to one of my favourite exhibitions – small, simple, dense: ‘Ernste Spiele’ (Serious Games), curated by Henriette Huldisch, at Berlin’s Hamburger Banhof – of 2014. A year when the violence of unwatchable images coming from Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Italian island of Lampedusa, Sierra Leone, to name but a few, made it really hard to keep eyes open, and to take in the violence, generated by humans and circulated by the media. Farocki’s four-part series ‘Ernste Spiele’ (2009-10), also on show in Berlin, is still running in my head, with images of real and computer-generated US warfare intertwining as much on screen as in real life, while the video cycle ‘Parallel I-IV’ (2012-14), a highlight from Art Basel Unlimited, is still asking critical questions on how machines and dystopian game worlds are reprogramming our connection with reality.
Paul Chan, The argument: Antietam, 2013, Volumes, 2012 and Tablet 3, 2014, exhibition view, © Paul Chan. Photo Tom Bisig
Paul Chan’s retrospective Selected Works at Basel’s Schaulager brought up further questions on what we are collectively made to see, what we want other people to see, and what is visible, in the post-Internet realm, thanks to works such as My birds . . . trash . . . the future(2004), the series of installations ‘The Arguments’ (2013), with their networks of power cords and concrete-filled shoes, and the Non-projections (2013), minuscule films that became perceptible only when placing a hand in front of the projectors. Simple gestures work their magic with me.
As to museum exhibitions in my home country Italy, I’ll pick the twin, anxiety-triggering solo of Ian Cheng (curated by Filipa Ramos) and Michael E. Smith (curated by Simone Menegoi and Alexis Vaillant) at the Triennale in Milan, the white cavernous rooms of which were left almost empty for a change, in resistance to the overwhelming monumentality of the building.
Another stunning exhibition was ‘Soleil Politique. The museum between light and shadow’, curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc at Museion in Bozen/Bolzano, as part of the programme Piano (Prepared Platform for Contemporary Art 2014/15) of collaborations between French and Italian institutions. It owes its title to an eponymous work (exhibited at the entrance desk) by Marcel Broodthaers, dated 1972: a map of our solar system showing the size of all planets, altered by the artist who cancelled the tiny Earth with a black dot and added the word “politique” (political) to the towering Sun, the quintessential image of power. While rigorously retracing the history of Museion, as well as of Bozen and its conflicted architecture before and after Fascism and WWII, Bal-Blanc assembled documents, artworks, models, films, installations and references in the most personal way, disclosed by an intimate visual ‘diary’ on display, which maps the construction of the exhibition.
Bal-Blanc also reversed the hierarchic and functional structure of the museum, by leaving the last floor, with its breath-taking views of the Dolomites, entirely empty and freely accessible to the public, while packing instead the show into the ground-floor space of the building normally used for events. Together with Walter Pichler’s and Gianni Pettena’s anarchitectural interventions, a personal favourite was the recreation of the decor of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s set for Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) made by Berlin-based artist duo Prinz Gholam using works from the museum’s collection (faces, shapes, gestures, tones, acts, places, 2014), as well as their silent performance in front of the piece on the opening night.
Joan Jonas, Reanimation (2010/2012/2013). Performance: Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014. Photo: MatteoScarpellini/almaphotos.net Courtesy the artist.
In terms of the soothing powers of art, Joan Jonas’ retrospective Light Time Tales, curated by Andrea Lissoni at Hangar Bicocca in Milan (until 1 February 2015), is a trip to wonderland and I’m much looking forward to see Jonas take over the American pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale. To walk around the huge space, where the works are displayed with no partition, like hyperlinks, from her first videos to the last one, Beautiful Dog (2014), is an invitation to the voyage. Being able to see Jonas perform live Reanimation (2013, after Halldor Laxness’ great novel Under the Glacier of 1968), and thus to draw, read, play, shake, dance along Jason Moran’s music, filled me with enough energy to keep me going for months: ‘Time’, Jonas said, ‘is the only thing we can agree to be supernatural.’
During Frieze Week in London, for ‘An Evening of Performances’ at David Roberts Art Foundation, I was glad to hear Quinn Latimer and Megan Rooney fuse together their voices and poems in O LABORSISTERCONTINENTS (2014), as well as to be carried away by Planningtorock’s hypnotic Human Drama.
Invernomuto, Black Ark, 2014. Installation view. Photo: Giulio Boem. Courtesy of the artists and Marsèlleria, Milan.
To my record of positive vibes I’ll add also Italian artist duo Invernomuto’s recent solo at Marsèlleria in Milan, where from the last floor erupted the almighty voice of Lee Scratch Perry screaming: ‘Fire! Fire!’. As part of their ‘Negus Cycle’ (2011–ongoing), the artists have invited the great Rastafarian musician to their hometown (the small village of Vernasca, near Piacenza), in order to perform a purifying ritual, in reaction to the burning of an image of Haile Sélassié on the main square, after Italy’s colonial occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s.
Another moment of personal bliss came from Yamamoto Takayuki’s installation New Hell: What Kind of Hell Will We Go To? (2014), that I saw at Mori Museum in Tokyo, in the group show ‘The World Seen through Children’. The artist asked a group of kids to imagine, assemble with paper and cardboard, and describe in depth their ideal hells, based on personal (non-traumatic) experiences of childhood and education. Fire and brimstone aside, it was exhilarating.
A positive note about last year in Italy was the undercurrent of shows self-organized by artists (or by joint ventures of artists and curators) across a network of small independent spaces – for instance Tile Project and Armada in Milan, where meanwhile Gasconade has closed its doors to become a project of collective novel-writing. If this seems partly the effect of a lack of attention from the side of galleries and official institutions, it signals the presence of a local scene with a good deal of energy.
In spring, Ludovica Carbotta asked a vast group of artists and curators for definitions of ‘community’ and then used them to create installations and sculptures at Milan’s non-profit space CareOf, under the guidance of Martina Angelotti. From June to September, in San Giovanni Valdarno (Renaissance painter Masaccio’s birthplace in Tuscany), Rita Salvaggio coordinated an array of exhibitions and performances that occupied the whole town with a lively group portrait of the current generation (Alessandro Agudio, Marco Basta, Lupo Borgonovo, Cleo Fariselli, Dario Guccio, Helena Hladilovà, Invernomuto, Andrea Kvas, Alice Mandelli, Beatrice Marchi, Anna Mostosi, Gianni Politi, Lisa Rampilli, Giangiacomo Rossetti, Manuel Scano, Namsal Siedlecki, Davide Stucchi, and Serena Vestrucci).
In Rome, in late September, artists Stanislao Di Giugno, Giuseppe Pietroniro, Marco Raparelli and Alessandro Cicoria brought together around 30 participants under the title There Is No Place Like Home, and took over a building site for three days and three nights. In Milan, again in September, artists Alis/Filliol, Luca De Leva, Andrea De Stefani, Helena Hladilovà, Invernomuto, Diego Marcon, Giovanni Oberti, Namsal Siedlecki and Gianandrea Poletta, together with Vittorio Rappa and Daniele Sansavini, produced and installed the group show Keep It Real in the Lambrate area. Many more should be mentioned here, and in far less central locations, so my apologies: for a good daily coverage of exhibitions and projects happening around Italy please go to Elena Bordignon’s blog Art * Texts * Pics (www.atpdiary.com).
Looking forward to: seeing the Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor; reading Helen Mirra: Edge Habit Materials (Whitewalls/University of Chicago Press), a survey of the artist’s works between 1995 and 2009; watching more episodes of The Amazing World of Gumball with my son.