Spring–summer 2023 program 

Ar/Ge Kunst, Bozen-Bolzano’s Kunstverein, was founded in 1985. The name Ar/Ge Kunst means both working group (an abbreviation of Arbeitsgemeinschaft) and to unsettle (from the German arge). The Kunstverein’s programming in 2023 aims to deepen the collective aspect inherent in the name Ar/Ge Kunst as a space of political rehearsal in which every new production forges a new working group of practitioners to rattle social, legal and artistic possibilities.

Die Fliege is a fly in volo
February 23–May 27, 2023

Working group: Chaw Ei Thein (Yangon, 1969), Htein Lin (Mezaligon, Ayeyarwady Region, 1966), Ko Latt (Yangon, 1987), Moe Satt (Yangon, 1983), Nge Lay (Pyin Oo Lwin, Mandalay Region, 1979), Amol K. Patil (Mumbai, 1987), Yadanar Win (Yangon, 1987). Loan of works from Collection Htein Lin, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Curated by Zasha Colah and Francesca Verga.

Htein Lin conceived an explosively funny performance, The Fly, in a Myanmar jail under military rule in 2001. The first exhibition under the new artistic direction of Ar/Ge Kunst, repeats and recycles The Fly through the artist’s own recorded re-enactments once freed and during his second imprisonment in 2022, by other artists who witnessed the comedic masterwork. Every mutation of The Fly ironises the present anew. The exhibition entwines the devices of intergenerational transmission of oralities with the aesthetics of recuperation within artists’ works, of dismantled and receding art histories.

Prisoners Sound Archive 
by Mauro Tosarelli

The Prisoners Sound Archive is an archive of sounds that can’t be heard from within a prison cell, recorded by former prisoners in Palestine and family members of people in detention, in order to answer the question “what sounds people inside would like to hear?” 

The Scorched Earthly. A Sit-In
April 4–May 27, 2023

Working group: Soloman Chiniquay (artist, filmmaker, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ territory and Treaty 7 territory, 1996), Valeen Jules (artist, poet, birthworker, Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka’wakw nations, 1996), Desmond Kharmawphlang (poet, Shillong, 1964), Ko Latt (artist, Yangon, 1987), Arkotong Longkumer (anthropologist, Kohima, Nagaland), Saviya Lopes (artist, Vasai, 1994), Poly Marchantia (artist collective, Milano, 2020), Zamthingla Ruivah (artist, songwriter, Ukhrul, Manipur, 1966), Yadanar Win (artist, Yangon, 1987), Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (artist, Shan State Burma, 1971). A research project commissioned by 221A, Vancouver. Partners: Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Curated by Zasha Colah, Francesca Verga, and Valentina Viviani.

Taking the form of an occupation, or Sit-in, the exhibition records poetic voices and artistic actions from terrains connected by their bearing and desisting of scorched-earth manoeuvres. It sings of pacific protests and resistance barricades that occupied or reclaimed city-streets, highways, and forest groves by enacting earthly communities, against the militarization and ecocide of territories, the forced disappearance of world-founding spiritual practices, and the extraction of vital forces. The voices, weavings, performances, and songs connect narrations of buffalo slaughter in the 1800s in Canada; songs of burnt forest land, Gaidinliu’s coming of the heraka, the Black Priestess’s reforesting a sacred grove in Zomia; and the action In Defence of the Native Forest in Córdoba-Argentina; with the human barriers during the Chipko movement, the occupation of a national highway, and farmers’ protests in India; the Fairy Creek Blockade in British Columbia; and the htamein barricades from Yangon Artists’ Street in 2021. 

L’Offesa
June 9–July 29, 2023

Working group: Lucia Marcucci (Italy, 1933), Wissal Houbabi (Morocco, 1994), Elena Biserna (Italy, 1982), Annamaria Ajmone (Italy, 1981) with Laura Agnusdei (Italy, 1990). Curated by Francesca Verga and Zasha Colah.

On the occasion of Lucia Marcucci’s ninetieth birthday, the exhibition retraces some of the artist’s works from the 1960s up to the 1990s. Lucia Marcucci has been one of the members of Gruppo ’70 (with Eugenio Miccini, Lamberto Pignotti and Luciano Ori) and she is one of the leading figures of Italian visual poetry. The exhibition re-examines how speech, advertising, media and paper were questioned in the 1960s and 1970s through militant practices intensifying verbal and bodily presence. L’Offesa develops a critical reflection on contemporary feminist and youth politics by placing some of Lucia Marcucci’s works in dialogue with voices by other artists and practices. The complementing exhibition, Lucia Marcucci. Poesie e no, opens at Museion Bozen-Bolzano, curated by Frida Carazzato. Partners: Museion, Lucia Marcucci Archive, Frittelli Arte Contemporanea Gallery Firenze, Bolzano Danza, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Faculty of Design and Art).