Anita Sieff
Ordine di Senso/The Appropriate Order
28 March – 30 May 2010
Palazzo Querini Stampalia
Santa Maria Formosa
Castello 5252
Venice
The exhibition, her first solo show in Venice, the city where she lives and works, is curated by Chiara Bertola.
Ordine di Senso is part of a larger project called Conservare il futuro, Conserving the Future, presented by the Querini Stampalia Foundation together with the Veneto Regional Government, and is in collaboration with the Fondazione di Venezia.
Through more than twenty works – drawings, photographs, films, video and sound installations, many of them site specific works– the artist investigates the memory site’s comparing past time with the present and placing them in a single space-time sequence.
Anita Sieff has been active in the field of the visual arts since the ’80s; her work analyses the changes that contemporary society, conditioned by mass media, induces on the community and interpersonal relationships. This social model, based on the promotion of image and its unbridled drive to consumerism, engulfs human beings and their most intimate and deepest aspects, depriving them of their capacity either to make choices or to discover themselves.
Returning to origins, recuperating history, becomes therefore a way to link up again with fundamental and structural principles so as to allow us to aim for a goal that, far from the annihilating consumerism of the collective destiny, takes us to our personal destiny. The director of the video installation Ordine di Senso says: “History belongs to the one who writes it, and we can all write our own history”. Indeed by visiting the show, the public can, perceive and carry within them different meanings, creating yet another personal appropriate order.
Anita Sieff’s project winds through the exhibition area and the Museum-home space creating a dialogue between the context and the people who lived there once and today.
So is Poesia, Poetry, a sound-installation on the museum floor, which interlaces the hopes of the Eighteenth Century figure of Elena Mocenigo Querini with those of a woman of our time. While the video installation Ordine di Senso, which gives its name to the entire show, is split across three screens and stimulates an attention span on three levels of perception: wakefulness, dreaming, and awareness. For the artist it is important to bring the past into the present because it allows to “go beyond history as a linear sequence of cause and effect, and permits the coexistence of different densities of being: those intermediate states which permit a deep awareness of our centre. The thoughts that Elena has entrusted to her correspondence are echoed by the voice of the director: “We all dream. And from this derives the energy which helps us give a tone to our everyday life”.
Conserving the future is a project based on the relationship between ancient and contemporary art, between a past to protect and a future to project. The concept is to involve the most significant artists both nationally and internationally, inviting them to reflect on the family’s collections conserved in the Museum and Library of the Foundation, creating site-specific projects which propose ever new interpretations. From 2004 artists such as: Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Caccavale, Remo Salvadori, Georges Adeagbo, Stefano Arienti, Maria Morganti, Mariateresa Sartori, Mona Hatoum have exhibited
Dates
From 28 March to 30 May 2010
Times
From Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed on Mondays
Catalogue
The catalogue, in English and Italian, is published by Edizioni Gli Ori Prato and includes photographs of the whole installation at Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Technical Partner
3P technologies
Information – Press Office
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