On The Breadline, winner of the IV Edition of Italian Council (2018) – a competition coinceived by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries (DGAAP) – an organism of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, to promote Italian contemporary art in the world – is a traveling art project by Elena Bellantoni that unfolds over one year and covers the “breadline” in 4 countries: Italy, Greece, Serbia and Turkey. The Breadline followed by the artist is also a line of poverty that has affected histories and stories in these countries, marked by “bread revolts”. The final product will be four-channel video that will be included in the permanent collection of multimedia works at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, (Rome), and later presented at a solo exhibit in 2020.
The new appointment for Albumarte/videoArtForum is the opportunity to see the latest video work by Paola Gandolfi La parola capovolta (The word upside down)(2019). Gandolfi, versatile artist, has always been focusing her attention onto the image of the women with an introspective, multiple and at the same time overturned gaze: the feminine shape is sectioned, disjoined, and fragmented. Gandolfi, by digging into the multiple possibilities of the imagination and the unconscious and by drawing from a fantastic and surreal imaginary ,is constantly seeking the meaning of being a woman beyond of the surface of epidermis. In her work “the word”, understood as thought and imagination, it is turned upside down; the normal flow of thinking is explored backwards, from the outside to the inside, from the cosmic space to the maternal womb.
The project has been realized thanks to memories and gazes of women prisoners in Rebibbia, through their pains and fears. They are linked to the nuns who inhabited in the past the Buon Pastore, a former convent and first women’s prison established by the Church and therefore place of detention and punishment. Two stories, where past and present meet: women with a turbulent past to whom is given a new life, alongside with the name of those women that didn’t make it and have been brutalize by their partner, husband. In Potenza sono Tutto it’s a work about the place and the memory : four photographic projections plus a performance evoke both the women prisoners and the nuns keepers of that Prison Institute, reactivating the memory of that place. The project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Casa Internazionale delle Donne e dell’ UDI – Unione Donne in Italia.
Is the first solo show in Rome of the young artist Cosimo Veneziano (Moncalieri, lives and works in Leeds, UK) who presents in Rome a group of works centred on the concept of monument and body. The title chosen by the curator “was inspired by a work of Lithuanian sculptor Mindaugas Navakas and plan to be a playful reflection on what the history of sculpture/monument represents today, and refers to the work of Cosimo Veneziano. The work on monuments and the changing of public artworks, and how a monument of the past represents when the dominant ideology and real facts of a certain place or nation change, has always generated fruitful reflections.
Unusual scenarios and contexts alongside everyday elements become the structural components of works by the young Lithuanian artist Egle Budvytyte (1982). Within her works, Budvytyte creates short circuits between reality and fiction, opening up questions about the role of the subject with respect to social reflection in a broader sense. Through the video works and installations of Egle Budvytyte, the exhibition aims to be a reflection on the economic and social time period that marks our movements, our rhythms, creating some momentary voids in which the imagination takes over. In a global scenario based more and more on cyber-intelligence, in which both economic and social conflicts seem to be governed by the virtual power of the net, the work of the artist stands as a natural reaction of the rejection of contemporary society. Groups or individuals challenge conventions, led sometimes by a voice off camera like a deus ex machina, which tells or leads them to oppose the rules imposed.
Macro Testaccio represents the final stage of the project : Fish cannot carry guns, a journey through the work, the thought and the inquiry of the artist started on November 2016 with a first episode RWD/FWD, that took place at the artist’s Studio. The title, chosen by Pirri himself, it’s a tribute to The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick (1981), in which the author imagines an unarmed and fluid society as an open sea wherein to plunge and re-emerge giving shape to multiform events. The entire project has the purpose of creating a new cultural network model, strongly wanted by Pirri, in which each involved institution is independent but at the same time in a constant contact with the others.
Lina Lapelytė a young Lithuanian artist, performed in Albumarte Yes. Really! This performance action conveys two different spheres of expression, contemporary art and music, that combine and influence each other. Lapelytė draws inspiration from popular music and folk, linked to an investigation into the semantics of words. Songs become tools for playing and creating connections and references between music and words, between the musicality of the notes and phonetics of words. Lina Lapelytė emerges as one of the most promising contemporary artists in the international arena. Her work employs body, action, melodrama as well as symphonic music, in order to connect to the present time social context.
The exhibition, which takes its name from Patella’s first solo show at the gallery L‘Attico of Rome in 1968, attempts to offer, through a selection of some of the most important works of his long career, many of which resubmitted to the public for the first time, the possibility of reading again, critically, the first part of the artist’s journey and of opening new and more informed perspectives of interpretation. Anticipating artistic and cultural tendencies that would emerge only in the following decades, Patella on the first decade of the sixties pioneered in Europe the artistic use of photography and film, often in relation to the dimensions of natural space and architecture.The show unfolds through a series of “environments” displayed together to form an itinerary that highlights Patella’s peculiar creative process. The installations, performances, photographic images, Polaroids, films and books work together to outline the image of a “total” artist, creating unusual points of view to observe changes in the surrounding world and the transformation of artistic languages in a crucial period of artistic events over the last decades.
Traces represent the second exhibition of Marguerite de Merode in Lithuania after her solo at the Graphic Art Centre in Vilnius both curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini.
The photographic works tell the artist’s in-depth study on the migration issue starting from a meaningful work as the installation About Alì (2011). Each works on exhibit have the purpose highlight multiple aspects that a single character can take on.
SPACES NON SPACES is a project conceived by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini for Ex Elettrofonica interpreting the gallery as a non-space, following the concept of Marc Augé; as a knot or web of a world without borders, a place to lose ourselves and simultaneously find ourselves. In a city like Rome, characterized by history and time, non-spaces reveal passages in which space, no longer divided by frontiers, opens up to new shared experiences. The non-space thus becomes a positive element to set against the idea of belonging connected with our roots, one in which the void left by the new global society creates not only alienated spaces but sites in which we can recognize ourselves and create new phases of planning and evolution.
The first exhibition is dedicated to Alis/Filliol, the alias of Davide Gennarino and Andrea Respino, a duo who came together in Turin in 2007. Their artistic inquiry revolves around sculpture in the most traditional sense of a technique which offers unexpected and often unknown potentialities, and which leads to clashes in the process of its making that imply the need to involve both of the conflicting elements in the object’s realization.
Espacios Urbanos aims to explore the evolution of the concept of cities in contemporary culture through ideas and photographs of the five most important representatives of the Düsseldorf School: Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff e Thomas Struth. The exhibition is composed by 50 artworks produced from the early Eighties until recent times depicting the different perception of each artist on the urban space. This is the first time Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth are joined in an exhibition under a common theme – the City.
