A chi ti stai rivolgendo / Who Is Your Audience
a project curated by Lorenzo Bruni for AstuniPublicStudio
John Bock, Vlatka Horvat, Christian Jankowski, Joel Kyack, Kamen Stoyanov, Mario Ybarra Junior
Bologna 40126
Via Iacopo Barozzi, 3
Ph: +39 051 4211132
F: +39 051 4211242
info [at] galleriaastuni.it
www.galleriaastuni.com
AstuniPublicStudio is pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition A chi ti stai rivolgendo / Who is your Audience curated by Lorenzo Bruni—which will open on Friday 8th October 2010 at Galleria Enrico Astuni in Bologna. The show consists of a series of performances, images, and sculptures specially created for the occasion, together with works previously made for important international exhibitions. John Bock, Vlatka Horvat, Christian Jankowski, Joel Kyack, Kamen Stoyanov, and Mario Ybarra Junior, some of the most interesting artists at the international level, reflect on the concept of cultural identity by encouraging and investigating the relationship between artist and audience, between listener and speaker, and between collective and private spaces. The works on show aim not to represent the reality they are in, but rather to focus on attempts to interact with it.
The A chi ti stai rivolgendo / Who is your Audience project is the outcome of a more general reflection on the act of “communicating”. While messages can be thrown into our “liquid modernity”, existing quite independently from a specific, “active” interlocutor in that particular instant, what is it that brings about the need for an exchange of information? Paradoxically, it almost seems that MMS and SMS messages, social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and the various blogs that have sprung up are used more to assert the existence of the person who sends the message than to bring about a dialogue with the “other”, who is different from us. Raising queries today about the true meaning of communication brings into question the very nature of the audience and of collective identity, as well as what we mean by this term, and what role it plays with regard to society. These considerations become an ideal means for shedding new light on the evolution of artistic research in the late 1990s and, in particular, on those artists who approached changes in social customs and habits by reacting to them and working on the relationships—which still remained entirely to be examined and elicited—between the individual and society, and between the space of art and that of life.