Exhibition programme 2024

Ciao! MACRO—Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, under the aegis of Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, has extended Luca Lo Pinto’s contract as artistic director until the end of the year: Museum for Preventive Imagination will continue throughout 2024, giving form to a programme that has taken on the experimental guise of a magazine, both as a method of investigation into the work of artists and as tool for the interpretation of contemporary culture. The 2024 exhibition programme kicks off today, February 9, with the opening of 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS by the duo Bless and Triviale by Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative. 

25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS is the first institutional show in Italy dedicated to the work of the self-dubbed “situation designers” Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, founders of Bless. Born in 1995, Bless is a transdisciplinary studio working on the edges of fashion, product design and the gestural (in the form of objects or constellations of objects). Often characterised as a person, the products she makes and wears are at once practical, conceptual and surreal, she doesn’t do shows, she doesn’t do exhibitions, rather she transforms these into everyday environments. An installation project, conceived for the occasion, presents creations and collaborations that allude to over 25 years of work, and of “always stress” with Bless.

Triviale presents the work of French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980) with and within the Feel Good Cooperative collective, founded in Rome in 2020 by the artist herself together with architect and researcher Serena Olcuire and a group of Colombian trans sex workers. The exhibition presents a theatrical set in which the public and the domestic nature of sex work are enacted. Three films made in Rome by the cooperative between 2021 and 2023, set respectively along Via Appia Antica, the nave of St. Peter’s and Via Cristoforo Colombo, create a three-way junction within the exhibition. Here, the overlapping monumental power structures that characterise the city—the Roman Empire, the Church, the legacy of Fascism—are revealed from the perspective of a group of sex workers. The exhibition is realised with the support of Trampoline, Association in support of the French art scene, Paris and Nuovi Mecenati.

Retrofuturo. Notes for a Collection also presents today new works by Michela de Mattei, Chiara Enzo, Sara Leghissa and Gabriele Silli, the last group of artists to join the exhibition, after Federico Antonini, Monia Ben Hamouda, Riccardo Benassi, Ruth Beraha, Carola Bonfili, Costanza Candeloro, Ludovica Carbotta, Beatrice Celli, Giulia Cenci, Alessandro Cicoria, Gianluca Concialdi, Giulia Crispiani, Giorgio Di Noto, Roberto Fassone, Irene Fenara, Giorgia Garzilli, Diego Gualandris, Lorenza Longhi, Eleonora Luccarini, Beatrice Marchi, Diego Marcon, Jim C. Nedd, Francis Offman, Parasite 2.0, Francesco Pedraglio, Margherita Raso, Real Madrid, SAGG NAPOLI, Davide Stucchi and Ilaria Vinci.

The exhibitions opening on March 21 are dedicated to artist and musician Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, artist and designer Luigi Serafini, artist Laura Grisi and graphic designer, cartoonist and musician Stefano Tamburini. A large solo show on Elisabetta Bensassi opens on May 9 and, starting on May 30, monographic exhibitions will also be dedicated to two women with ties to Rome, poet Patrizia Cavalli and artist Marcia Hafif who spent long periods of time in the city during the 1960s.

The second half of the year will feature various different initiatives culminating with Post Scriptum. Un museo dimenticato a memoria (A museum forgotten by heart), a group exhibition that serves as an epilogue to the Museum for Preventive Imagination. This special edition of the museum-magazine will spread throughout the spaces of the museum.

Please visit museomacro.it for updates, extra content, and to explore my current exhibitions. I’m waiting for you in Rome!