November 9, 2018–March 3, 2019
Via Sebastiano Satta, 27
08100 Nuoro NU
Italy
T +39 0784 252110
info@museoman.it
Sabir
Dor Guez
Sogno d’oltremare
François-Xavier Gbré
O Youth and Beauty!
Anna Bjerger, Louis Fratino, Waldemar Zimbelmann
November 9, 2018–March 3, 2019
Curator: Luigi Fassi
The Mediterranean’s history and politics is at the core of the upcoming programme of the MAN Museum, an institution located in the heart of Sardinia and engaged in raising questions about the cultural and political context of the contemporary Mediterranean world.
Three shows opening on November 9 will lay forth the institution’s driving lines of research and development.
With his video works and photographs, Jerusalem-born artist Dor Guez (Israel) questions ideas around ethnic identity by exploring the history of his own family, rooted in a diverse background in which elements of Christian, Arab, Jewish, Palestinian and Israeli culture and history merge. In his first solo museum exhibition in Italy, Sabir, Dor Guez presents his ongoing Christian Palestinian Archive (CPA), a growing collection of scans of archival documents from the first half of the 20th century onward, documenting the personal histories of the Christian Palestinian community and its worldwide diaspora. This presentation will be accompanied by two video works alongside a new immersive sound installation commissioned by MAN.
Dor Guez lives and works in Jaffa, Israel.
François-Xavier Gbré’s (France/Ivory Coast) photographic research brings to light neglected stories from African modernity, thus contributing to a rewriting of the recent history of the continent. The French-Ivorian artist pursues an exploration of West African cities, such as Abidjan, Dakar and Bamako, drawing attention to buildings and civic structures where the past appears both foreign and unfinished. His strategy privileges elements that can be observed in public space, such as public architecture (swimming pools, sports stadiums) and decorative elements (monuments, murals) observed as futuristic symbols of progress or ambivalent signs of exclusion. His first Italian solo exhibition project Sogno d’oltremare (Overseas Dream), brings together a selection of his African photographic series together with new pictures realised while in residency in Sardinia (in co-operation with the Sardinia Film Commission) and commissioned by MAN. The project engages with the cross-cultural themes addressed by Gbré’s work in Africa and Sardinia, such as migration, soil and labour exploitation, and displaced identities.
François-Xavier Gbré lives and works in Abidjan, France/Ivory Coast and La Rochelle, France.
Taking its title from the homonymous short story authored by American novelist John Cheever, O Youth and Beauty! presents recent works by three artists, Anna Bjerger (lives and works in Älmhult, Sweden), Louis Fratino (lives and works in New York City, USA) and Waldemar Zimbelmann (lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany). Sharing an intimistic use of figurative painting, the three artists engage with a diaristic approach within their practice in which the merging of realism and illusion generate unexpected revelations from mundane, daily-life scenes. Anna Bjerger’s paintings depart from found, anonymous photographs to chart indefinable figures in unclear scenarios. Mostly depicted in isolation and with an evocative painterly language, her characters capture moments of stillness and psychological concentration. Louis Fratino’s emotional realism interprets male characters manifesting a faith in the dailiness of lived experience. The artists’ drawings and paintings merge fiction and reality by portraying friends and lovers, together with people never met. Waldemar Zimbelmann’s characters appear to be subjected to a metamorphic process, wherein animals, children, natural landscapes and domestic interiors are superimposed in anthropomorphic evanescence.
The accompanying publications comprise a series of five conversations with the artists, authored by Giuseppe Di Salvatore, Luigi Fassi, Emanuela Manca and Alessandro Salice.
The three projects are realised with the contribution of the Sardinian Region, the Province of Nuoro and the Fondazione di Sardegna.
Dor Guez’s show is generously supported by the Artis Grant Program
For press enquiries please contact:
PCM Studio di Paola C. Manfredi Milan (IT) www.paolamanfredi.com
T +39 0784 252110
