Fondazione Prada’s three venues in Milan and Venice are active all the summer, offering an extensive cultural program spanning contemporary art, cinema, photography and science.
Useless Bodies? Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibition, in Milan until August 22
Conceived for four gallery spaces and the courtyard of the Milan venue, Useless Bodies? explores the present condition of the body in the post-industrial age in which our physical presence is losing its centrality or is even completely superfluous. This shift impacts every aspect of our lives: from our working conditions to our health, our interpersonal relationships, and how we live in the public sphere. Each exhibition space addresses an independent everyday scenario (the gym, the home, the office or the museum itself) through a sequence of immersive installations and new works. Elmgreen & Dragset’s project aims to contribute to new debates about how to reclaim the body in the future societies.
“Questioning Bodies” podcast series, online project
Through ten open-ended questions, the episodes of “Questioning Bodies” bring the body back into the focus of intellectual enquiry. The series turns into podcasts some of the essays commissioned for the book Useless Bodies?, a 500-page publication conceived as a thematic extension of Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibition. It is a reader with multiple perspectives from over 35 authors —philosophers, artists, writers, scientists, and thinkers— sharing their ideas about our time in which physical presence seems to have lost its usefulness. The ten podcasts will be published on Fondazione Prada’s website, and its Soundcloud and Spotify accounts until the end of the exhibition.
Role Play group show, at Osservatorio in Milan until September 26
Role Play explores the notions of the search and invention of possible alternative identities, hovering between authentic, idealized, and universal selves. It includes a selection of photographic, video and performing works by 11 international artists such as Meriem Bennani, Juno Calypso, Cao Fei, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Beatrice Marchi, Darius Mikšys, Narcissister, Haruka Sakaguchi & Griselda San Martin, Tomoko Sawada, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, and Amalia Ulman. Playing with gender tropes, stereotypes, sense of place, and future perspectives, these artists interrogate the ever-changing notions of individuality and identity. Role-playing, creating alter-egos, and proliferation of selves are possible strategies for understanding everyone’s essence and persona.
“Multiple Canvases” film program, at the Milan Cinema until October 1
“Multiple Canvases” is a film program conceived by artists Elmgreen & Dragset and the scientific board of the multidisciplinary project Human Brains. The screenings take place every Friday and Saturday from 1 to 30 July and from 2 September to 1 October, at Fondazione Prada’s Cinema in Milan. In July, the movable walls of the Cinema building will be completely open, creating a hybrid environment: a projection room characterized by constant visual osmosis between the inner space, the courtyard and the other structures of the architectural compound designed by Rem Koolhaas.
Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea exhibition project, in Venice until November 27
Human Brains is the result of an intensive investigative process undertaken since 2018 by Fondazione Prada in the field of neuroscience, driven by a deep interest in understanding the brain, the complexity of its functions, and its centrality to human history. The exhibition Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea is curated by Udo Kittelmann in collaboration with Taryn Simon. Covering three floors of the Ca’ Corner della Regina building, the show navigates a history of neuroscientific knowledge-making marked by rigour, breakthrough, and discovery, as well as error and uncertainty. It traces the outlines of consciousness, the gaps in scientific research, and what is known and unknown in our understanding of the human brain. The next phase of the Human Brains project will be “Preserving the Brain,” a forum on neurodegenerative diseases, scheduled in Milan in September and October 2022.
