In a time where contemporary art is often focused on the recent crises that are involving the entire globe, it’s important just take a while in order to understand and realize which kind of options and possibility we have. Indeed, different artists are trying to give us answers, visions on our next future… In this context, Fondazione 107 in Turin is hosting an interesting project signed by Federico Piccari, that present a decennial search on this macro area.
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Titled "Hortus Conclusus", this exhibition present artworks by thirty artists from Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA, all of them employees in the use of various media. But let's jump inside the heart of this exhibition, by following the official curatorial statement... The title "Hortus Conclusus" was chosen to convey the intimacy of secret thought and, at the same time, the possessive field of the intellectual work of an artist, a writer or a school of poetry. To achieve this, the participating artists are linked to each other by a shared modus operandi that induces them to take steps, by means of their action, to transform a consolidated situation that has reached a critical breaking point.
For this reason "Hortus Conclusus" will become the ideally constructed place where the word krisis acts as the driving force for a heterogeneous, across-the-board itinerary, a word from which we garner the original etymological meaning in classical Greek, which conveys the sense of ‘opportunity’, the moment when a decisive choice is made that can open the way to new possibilities and strive to seek out new solutions. This is the approach that has been adopted by the artists invited to take part in the exhibition when constructing their works. There is no single rule: there is a mental process that combines with a method of action to highlight the approach adopted by the artist to tackle the world. As Federico Piccari said:
The word ‘crisis’ has been attributed a leading role both in our era and in our everyday lives. There is much talk of crisis in general, of a crisis of our system, of a personal crises, of the economic crisis, of emotional crises, of the crisis of conscience, of cardiac crises, of anaphylactic crises, of crises of hypertension, of crises of hysteria, of nervous crises, of crises of crying, of being at a critical breaking point, of overcoming a crisis, of the crisis of adolescence, of the crisis of despondency, of the crisis of identity, of spiritual crises, of religious crises, of the crisis of society, of the crisis of values, of the crisis of civilisation, of the crisis of the institutions, of the crisis of the family, of the crisis of the couple, of the great crisis, of the crisis of the year... We have firms and entire sectors that are in a critical situation and we have structural crises, we talk of the energy crisis and of the crisis of parliamentary democracy: a government is said to be in crisis when it teeters on the edge. There is also a crisis in the birth rate and we discuss whether there will be an end to the crisis: it is with this negative meaning that the term ‘crisis’ spread out in all directions during the twentieth century.
The use and abuse of the word crisis has gone some way to depriving the term of its real original meaning. Anyone who was born in the sixties will have been accompanied by the word crisis at every step of the way through life: we could say that we struggle out of one crisis only to find ourselves up to our necks in the next.
“A crisis may be solved by returning to the previous status quo, but the true nature of the crisis is to trigger the search for new solutions and these may be both imaginary, mythological or magical and, on the contrary, practical and creative. A crisis is thus potentially a generator of illusions and/or of inventive activ- ities. More generally, it may be the source of progress (a new solution that overcomes contradictions or double-binds, increasing the system’s complexity) and/or the source of regression (a solution that goes beyond solutions and brings the system back to a condition of lesser complexity).” (Edgar Morin)
In this light the Russian artist Nika Neelova removes the handrails from houses that are awaiting demolition and transforms them, reassembling them into sculptures that give them a new lease of life. Roman Stanczak, an artist who will represent the Polish pavilion in the next Venice Biennale, interacts with objects found in every home – cupboards, sofas and chairs – using a hammer and chisel to carve into their skin, removing veneers, tearing out upholstery and stripping them down until they are as bare as us and our existence, in an act that is one of sharing, not of aggression, and in so doing offers us his own personal view of the world. In the work of Angelo Candiano, it is light that intervenes on pristine photographic paper, acting as an external element stimulat- ed by the artist, who is actually impotent in the presence of a process that he himself has set in motion and made unstoppable and infinite in time. The per- formance art of Mateusz Choróbski is induced by the moment when the bullet-proof glass in a bank window shatters, becoming a shout of rebellion against a system of power imposed on the individual. The fragments of glass, in different shapes and sizes, are fixed on neon tubes, restricting and calibrating the amount of light they can emit. In the paintings of Marcovinicio, the everyday elements he borrows from his world remain suspended on the surface, awaiting new possibilities and maybe ‘better times’, while the sculpture of David Jablonowski comprises canvas that adheres closely to a technological structure made of aluminium that in its turn retains organic elements gathered in the natural world: parrot wings that have been compressed and trapped in a process of cross-fertilisation.
Here the official list of all the invited artists, "Hortus Conclusus" and for more information Fondazione107:
Salvatore Astore (Italia), Isaac Brest (Usa), Simon Callery (Regno Unito), Angelo Candiano (Italia), Luigi Carboni (Italia), David Casini (Italia), Cosimo Casoni (Italia), Mateusz Choróbski (Polonia), Francesco Del Conte (Italia), Jiri George Dokoupil (Repubblica Ceca), Matteo Fato (Italia), Daniele Galliano (Italia), David Jablonowski (Germania), Sophie Ko (Georgia), Roberto Kusterle (Italia), Thomas Lange (Germania), Marcovinicio (Italia), Ryan Mendoza (Usa), Peter Mohall (Svezia), Johan Muyle (Belgio), Nika Neelova (Russia), Nicola Pecoraro (Italia), Federico Piccari (Italia), Antoine Puisais (Francia), Sergio Ragalzi (Italia), Piotr Skiba (Polonia), Roman Stanczak (Polonia), Luigi Stoisa (Italia), Georgy Tryakin-Bukharov (Kazakistan), Beat Zoderer (Svizzera).