LORENZO BONALDI PRIZE FOR ART –
ENTERPRIZE, 4TH YEAR
Data Recovery
curated by Övül Durmusoglu
artists: Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Michael Blum, Banu Cennetoglu, Goldin+Senneby, Klub Zwei, Susanne Kriemann
ELDORADO: KRIS MARTIN
INTER PARES
curated by Alessandro Rabottini
30 MAY – 27 JULY 2008
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Bergamo
Via S. Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo (Italy)
GAMeC presents two shows: Data Recovery, the winning exhibition of the 4th Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art – EnterPrize, and Inter pares by Kris Martin.
LORENZO BONALDI PRIZE FOR ART – ENTERPRIZE, 4TH YEAR
Data Recovery
The group show Data Recovery, curated by Övül Durmusoglu, is the winning project of the fourth Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art – EnterPrize. The project by Durmusoglu, nominated by Sabine Breitwieser (independent curator, Vienna), has been submitted to the jury comprised of: Dan Cameron (Director of Visual Arts CAC – Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans), Ralph Rugoff (Director Hayward Gallery, London) and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Director GAMeC, Bergamo).
The Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize is the first international competition dedicated to young curators under the age of 30, conceived to commemorate Lorenzo Bonaldi‘s passion for art and collecting. It was organized by GAMeC, and funded by the Bonaldi family for the first time in 2003. It represents a unique sort of recognition, because it rewards the research of a young curator and his or her exhibition project.
The project proposed by Övül Durmusoglu has taken its original inspiration – knowledge as a performative scene – from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Processes of knowing and not-knowing become more involved with artistic strategies and research in contemporary art. In particular, artists – by positioning themselves with changing realities and current events – attempt to recover certain untold and deliberately disregarded histories through their different methodologies. That is why Data Recovery has taken its title from the performative process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, wrecked or inaccessible primary storage media.
The artists contributing to the project – Julie Ault and Martin Beck, Michael Blum, Banu Cennetoglu, Goldin+Senneby, Klub Zwei, Susanne Kriemann – engage themselves with information using fresh methodologies of research and process. Ault and Beck realize a super sized mural called Information using data from poverty policies deployed by US government since 1964; Blum performs a fairy tale about the failures of grand ideologies of 20th century – communism, social democracy and capitalism – in his essay performance video The Three Failures; Cennetoglu’s photo installation Determined Barbara makes us question the existence of a SFOR military training ground constructed in Glamoc; Goldin+Senneby present a new stage of their work in progress Looking for Headless with Gone Offshore; Klub Zwei points towards how some histories like that of national socialism are very alive today, shaping perpetrators’ descendents’ personal lives in their video installation Väter Täter; Kriemann’s new artist’s edition 12 650 000 – produced for Data Recovery – reframes Berlin’s load test body “Grossbelastungskörper” commissioned by Albert Speer, writing its alternative history in an unexpected format.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication containing Jacques Rancière’s comment given in the framework of “Klartext! The Status of the Political in Contemporary Art and Culture” in Berlin 2005 and a new text written for Data Recovery by theorist and curator Stephen Wright alongside an introduction by the curator Övül Durmusoglu.
Data Recovery is realized with the support of: IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden), The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Milan.
Kris Martin. Inter pares
GAMeC hosts Inter pares by Belgian artist Kris Martin, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, as part of the program of Eldorado, the project room dedicated to the most interesting rising artists on the
international scene.
After his participation in the Berlin Biennial in 2006 and his recent solo exhibition at PS1 in New York in 2007, Kris Martin (Kortrijk, 1972) has attracted international attention thanks to the originality of his art that combines poetry, conceptual rigor and philosophical and literary memories.
His work reflects the existential questions that are fed by each human being throughout his existence and frequent references are made to religion, art and literature to express the constant amazement, melancholy and aspiration to knowledge that characterize our relationship with life and death.
The three spaces that constitute this exhibition conceived for GAMeC are also stages in an internal journey that touches the human need for awareness and the sense of frustration that is accompanied by hope and mystery, compassion and the perception of a common destination. In the first room are two sculptures from the Idiot series: Idiot III of 2006 and Idiot V of 2007. In both cases the symbols and icons of religiousness are caught in the act of closing into themselves, in a moment of aphasia and suspension. In the second space the spectator is fully immersed in a kind of collective portrait of a human genre and in the last room the protagonist is a sound installation in which a women’s voice whispers a question that is banal, yet vital, in its commonplaceness.
Completing Kris Martin’s exhibition is a publication by the artist conceived and designed by himself and realized in collaboration with Mousse magazine, and which contains a text by Martin Herbert and a conversation between the artist and Alessandro Rabottini, exhibition curator.
On view at GAMeC until 27th July: Yan Pei-Ming with Yan Pei-Ming and Donations to the Permanent Collection in the New Millennium.
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Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
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Image above:
Top:
Project for the catalogue of the exhibition Data Recovery by Ali Cindoruk, 2008
Bottom:
Kris Martin
Idiot V, 2007
Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf