Giovanni Anselmo
26 May-27 August 2006
Curated by: Gianfranco Maraniello, Andrea Viliani
Opening: 25 May 2006, 7 pm
Galleria dArte Moderna,
Piazza Costituzione 3, Bologna
Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am6 pm,
closed Monday
Free admission
www.galleriadartemoderna.bo.it
Catalogue: Hopefulmonster, Turin – Essays by Tacita Dean, Rosalind Krauss, Gianfranco Maraniello and an interview by Andrea Viliani with Giovanni Anselmo
In the year in which it is set to move to new premises in the ex Forno del Pane and to be renamed as the MAMbo – Museo dArte Moderna di Bologna – the Galleria dArte Moderna presents an exhibition of Giovanni Anselmo (Borgofranco dIvrea, 1934), one of the leading exponents of the Arte Povera movement. Realized as a unitary project and conceived as a total work, this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to admire in Italy the works of the Turin-based artist.
Starting with a compass positioned on a pile of earth in the middle of the museum, the show brings together a substantial number of works dating to the 60s and 70s, which are deliberately presented together with more recent installations. These make up a unitary environment that involves the entire museum in a slow, almost imperceptible bradyseism, a peaceful scattering of signs in the physical space and institutional framework of the building itself. Landscapes and panoramas arise out of each other, suggesting a multiplicity of possible spaces and times towards oltremare, where the invisible can manifest itself and where, climbing onto a block of stone, the stars are closer to the Earth, even if only by a few inches. The exhibition poetically evokes and accompanies the gallerys imminent move to its new premises.
Made from organic and inorganic materials such as stone, earth, metal, water and cotton, Anselmos works are installed and dotted around in the main exhibition spaces of the gallery. Rather than acting as separate metaphors or simulacra, they embody basic but generally unnoticed phenomena of knowledge translating them into perceptible experience: gravity, energy, the relation between general and particular, finite and infinite, culture and nature, the flow of historic time and the hypothesis of the eternity of universal physical laws, the realist, almost scientific method of experiencing and the abstraction of philosophical principles.
It is in this sense that Anselmo will put a second compass into place before the exhibition is officially opened, this time in the as-yet empty and locked premises of the ex Forno del Pane, an industrial building restored in the course of more than a decade inside the Manifattura delle Arti, Bolognas new arts complex. The compass will be set into the floor of the entrance hall of the museum, and will only go on public view after its official inauguration. In this way the work will effectively mark the move from one site to another and unite the clearly defined and limited duration of the exhibition with a temporality that unfolds towards a dimension of unimaginable breadth. The work (Direction, 2006) is the first artistic project conceived for MAMbos new home. It represents an act of faith in the present and future function of the museum and can also be viewed as a prehistoric event with regard to its future activities, a minimal and modest gesture that performs the primordial function of simply indicating the existence of the place, its position in the universe, a genuine bridge between microcosm and macrocosm.
The exhibition catalogue, published by Hopefulmonster, Turin, will appear after the end of the show, and will include exhibition views at the Galleria dArte Moderna as well as a documentation of the artists intervention at the MAMbo. The catalogue will also contain a comprehensive bio-bibliography and, amongst other contributions, new critical essays by the artist and writer Tacita Dean, the critic Rosalind Krauss and the curators Gianfranco Maraniello and Andrea Viliani.
Coming Soon MAMbo Museum Shows
With the preview of the film Caducean City by Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda (Madison, WI, 1976; Nagoya, 1977), the Galleria dArte Moderna di Bologna presents the fourth event in its Coming Soon MAMbo Museum Shows programme, conceived by the Director Gianfranco Maraniello and the curator Andrea Viliani. The programme consists of twelve solo exhibitions by artists from around the world and focuses on the identity and contemporary function of museums.
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda
Caducean City
On one day of no special significance April 4, 2006 at about 10 oclock in the morning – an ambulance moves through the streets of the city centre and suburbs of Bologna, following a labyrinthine and apparently grotesque itinerary that becomes an endless loop within the map of the city. The ambulance is not carrying anyone to safety. Instead it exemplifies and renders visible the implicit rules of the social contract whereby every individual regards themselves as the same as everyone else in relation to a public institution, and respects a tacit agreement based on fundamental norms of behaviour. In Caducean City, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda limit themselves to filming, in real time, the minimal possible variations with which this universal agreement is interpreted by the anonymous passers-by that the ambulance happens upon in the course of its journey. Caducean City, produced by the MAMbo – Museo dArte Moderna di Bologna – in conjunction with various other public institutions (the Bologna City Council, the Municipal Police and Ambulance Service) reflects the need of all contemporary institutions to conceive of themselves as flexible bodies permeated by the contradictions of contemporary society and, paradoxically, transforms the entire city into the set of a collective experience in which the museum can, albeit just for a few minutes, identify with and address the entire community.
Catalogue contributors: Jacob Fabricius, Andrea Viliani.
For the agreement to republish the Ludwig Wittgenstein’s text in the catalogue we would like to thank the Duke University Press (Durham) and The Master and Fellows, Trinity College (Cambridge).
Preview: thursday 25 May 2006, 5 pm
Cineteca di Bologna
Screenings: 1, 6 and 15 June 2006, 5 pm
Cineteca di Bologna
