A small ceramic trunk painted with an almost pearly pink dye is placed at the beginning of a staircase, in this position it’s like it wants to reach the top of the stairs and complete its path. This elephant section, whose phallic reference is more than evident, is part of the site specific installation Fataità […]
“The chicken incident? Do you mean throwing chicken into the audience? Which came first, the chickens or the feathers?” These are the words said in an interview by Vincent Furnier, known as Alice Cooper, about what went down in history as The infamous chicken incident: in 1969, during a live performance at a festival in […]
Charlotte Johannesson, one of the artists on display at the 59th Biennale Arte in Venice, presents her work as an oxymoronic example of how a traditional technique such as that of weaving manages to find its new dimension within technological and IT developments, apparently so distant. Looking at Pixel Dream (1981) one has the distinct […]
Stunned and numb, a human figure dressed up as a pink tiger is lying on a carpet, on the walls drawings that seem to have been made by children show the same subject repeated in different poses and attitudes: an obsessive representation of oneself. Anja Carr with her series Moments through the observer into her […]
To love, to touch, to breed, to burn, to crown. These are among the words we read in the work of the artist Candice Brietz. Conceived to be a video installation made up of 1001 channels, the artist deliberately does not show us moving images, but leaves to the viewer the construction of these images […]
While you go shopping in a Bavarian butcher’s shop, your eyes are overwhelmed by an impressive and varied selection of sausages, frankfurters and other sausages. Looking up, however, you notice something unusual, or rather out of place: Jetz geht’s um die Wurst (2019) is the work by the artist Björn Heyn. A large painting, almost […]
Jassie Home French with Oil Platform Fire (2020) brings us into an oxymoronic vision: bright and varied colors, ordered and geometric shapes contrast the natural disasters that often constitute the main subjects of the American artist’s canvases. The serenity suggested by the blue sky and the calm sea is interrupted by the main subject of […]
The greyhound was one of the most loved dogs by the ancient Romans, hunting dogs provided of great elegance were perfect companions to have within the walls of the villas of late antiquity. The pictorial and sculptural representations of the age of greyhounds are consequently very frequent and Oliver Laric, following his practice of recovery […]
Inside a dark and uncomfortable service tunnel, where the protagonists are unprotected electricity cables, conduits and exposed pipes, the emergency exit indicators should serve as ‘rescue anchors’ to ensure the passage. The site-specific installation, The Anxiety Parasites, designed by Lorenzo Lunghi for the exhibition spaces of NAM-Not a Museum in Florence, sabotages the normal functionality […]
A dog, whose name is Human, moves inside a park that has the appearance of a wild environment, almost a forest in which human intervention is not yet definable: the observer, following this guide with a pink paw, is led to discover the different interventions that the artist Pierre Huyghe has created within this artistic intervention whose contours are […]
Eye Massager is the writing shown on the viewer worn by the subject represented by Bharat Sikka: the portrait, which is part of the Sapper series (2019), shows the artist’s father in a moment of rest and fragility. This photograph seems to have several clues that lead the observer to the reconstruction of a character […]
The artist’s head, her hands and arms are grafted onto a very stylized body of a dog: Rona Pondick’s steel sculpture Dog (1998-2001) gives rise to a grotesque, disturbing and fascinating creature. By creating this self-portrait, the American artist starts the process of a real metamorphosis. The impression is almost of being in front of the protagonist […]
A small room with no entrances or exits, a sharp light and no furniture. Despite the austerity, this image attracts the attention by abstracting the space and reducing it to its functionality. Could it be a doll’s room? The model for a new room to be built? A sculpture or an installation? Room with windows […]
Two dogs, forced to stay behind a net, fix a specific point with particular attention and interest. They do this action for about thirty grueling minutes. At the beginning they generate frustration due to the impossibility of seeing the object of their desire but then it seems they give the canche for reflection on the […]
In front of us, in the darkness of space, two suns stand out. One approaches us fearfully, the other moves away only to meet in a median equilibrium. “Sunshine State” repeats the voice of artist Steve McQueen, “Sunshine State, Sunshine State”. We are already out of air. Then the movement of the two suns resumes, […]
Two bodies are drowing into the darkness of an ocean, probably a mother with her child. Miriam Cahan with her abstract painting tries to represent the vulnerability of man through his body which almost dematerializes and deforms, thus losing the elements of singularity and reaching a new degree of universality and identification. Miriam Chan’s painting […]
Cambio della guardia (Changing of the guard) is an impermanent intervention that lived in the garden of Villa Giulia, a private residence in Bologna, in 2021. The artist Bekhabaatar Enkhtur, works with sculpture privileging the use of materials that can highlight their own fragility and transience, in search of an approach that guides the viewer’s […]
A little girl doubles, triples and it almost seems that a fourth copy of her emerges among the others. The artist Allison Katz, in this series of paintings offers a work based on the daily life and on the clichés related to the city of Venice. InPortrait of the artist as a young girl(s) (2021) […]
The 8mm film Theodora or The Progress (2021) opens with the image of small dogs scurrying along the streets of a city, marking the territory with pee spots on the walls or playing with small branches randomly found. The frame turns black: a man, disguised as a dog, guides us inside a theater, with this […]
Deep gaze, bright eyes and teeth in sight. A dog observes us, between curious and threatening. We, together with the photographer Marco Signorini, hesitate in front of this creature. On the sand there are the footprints of a machine, an extra clue that allows the creation of a hypothetical narration that can reconstruct the scenario […]
What is the limit between the representation of ourselves and the construction of our image? Blonde/aqua sweater/dog by Laurie Simmons is an image that investigates exactly this sought-after space in which identity seeks its own expression. The artist, photographer and director, often creates dolls or puppets that through her set-ups, tries to make more human, […]
Cynopolis is the ancient name of Al Qeis, a city in Egypt. Its Greek meaning is The city of the dog and this is perhaps the reason why many necropolis dedicated to the burial of dogs have been found in these areas. The dog in Egyptian iconography and tradition is a very important figure: these […]
Confetti, waxes and lace, blood, masks, processions: Fat to Ashes becomes the container of a series of cultural expressions that move around the border between belief and transgression. The French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin puts together three events that seem to have nothing in common: the procession of Sant’Agata in Catania, the carnival in Cologne […]
Between the white walls of MAMbo the visitor finds a canvas, also white: Resultats pour la recherche, Italo Zuffi – nessun dato trovato (no data found). This is the blunt message that reveals the origin of the work: the artist entered his name in the research form of the online archive of the Center Pompidou […]
Starts Exalt the Darkening Sky is a site specific work by Ginevra Shay created on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the NO/Gallery spaces in Ghent. In the artist’s practice, the recognition and dialogue established with the place where she works is fundamental and often it is precisely by living the spaces that an […]
The first minutes of the video that contains the experience of Osteria di Canemorto flow by and, between be bewildered and intrigued, we continue observing what is happening. It almost seems to be inside a soap opera or a television show: the characters, none of whom is an actor, animate a small village restaurant (osteria […]
Balloo, Bagheera, Kaa and the other characters from the classic movie The Jungle Book animate the video by the artist David Claerbout entitled The Pure Necessity, but in an unexpected way. If the Disney classic released in 1967 was animated by wild dances, dynamism and a strong human characterization of the animal characters, inside Clearbout’s […]
Denizen is the exhibition set up at the Fondazione Pini Milan in September 2021 in which Freya Moffat presents her latest untitled series of works. The artist created life-size characters in papier- mâché, dressed them in modest and ordinary office clothes, placed these sculptures around the city – “denizen” means inhabitant – as intent on […]
It’s All Over But The Dreaming is a digital and interactive theatrical piece that the artist Tamara MacArthur realize by setting up a theatrical stage in her studio. The work, composed of different languages and media, can’t be circumscribed in a single genre and it leaves open the possibility of a reflection on artistic practices […]
Hands II, artwork by Sara Cwynar, represent the central elements of her research such as the process of dealing with archival images and of questioning the photographic language in its traditional exception. The original matrix of this work are photographs from the seventies that the artist found while walking around the streets of New York. […]
Cosplayers are basically young people who dress like video game characters to take on their characteristics and style. While dressed in this way, they go around the city or meet at dedicated fairs. In the video of the Chinese artist Cao Fei we see these figures moving in urban spaces, passing through parks, streets, river, […]
#13 (1992) testifies to Kiki Smith’s interest in the representation of the body and its relationship with the surrounding world. Like other Smith bodies, #13 is dismembered, captured in three quarters as in a clinical observation, it is the gateway to experience: focusing on organs, veins, muscles, Smith celebrates the vulnerability and perishable nature of […]
Copy, paste, enter: it appears a corner of a room, a basket and a crumpled paper left on the ground. Trash Loop.com is one of the net art interventions of Rafaël Rozendaal in which through the domain of a website, he gives the chance to access a work of art from the computer or smartphone […]
Jani Ruscica brings thier research through different languages, passing from photography to video, from sculpture to drawing. Following this multidisciplinarity, the artist constructs their work Conversation in Pieces (2016) consisting of a set of objects positioned on a stage that come to life thanks to a series of programmed performances. The five objects, echoes of […]
Solitaire Bug Report is a video made by the German collective kennedy+swan using augmented reality. The collective wants to reflect on technological evolution and its impact on nature and environment. In particular, the artists focus on the role of man within these changes: how can human attitude be changed in relation to natural dynamics? What […]
when you are close to me I shiver (2020) is a virtual reality work generated in real time in which Martina Menegon expresses concern about the climate emergency that is affecting our planet. The artist creates a live simulation controlled by algorithms in which a female narrator with a tone of voice very similar to […]
Photography as ready-made: the Time Measures series is a work consisting of 36 photographs, the result of a research project that Dayanita Singh has been developing for several years, that of documenting the traditional methods of archiving documents in government offices in India. Time Measures does not show us the documents themselves, neither show us […]
Nuovo Habitat (2021) by Mara Oscar Cassiani takes inspiration from recent archaeological discoveries that are helping to renew and reinvigorate the study of matrilineality in the ancient world. Through DNA tests it was understood that what for a long time had been considered the remains of a Viking warrior in the ancient city of Birka […]
Paper House is part of the photographic series False Idol (2017-ongoing) by Leonard Suryajaya, a Chinese-Indonesian artist who lives and works in Chicago. The series reflects on Suryajaya’s experience with the immigration office regarding his residence permit. Issues of cultural, territorial and family’s sense of belonging are elaborated by the artist in his tableaux, deliberately eccentric because the only […]
Skin of Light (2020) by Kate Dunn is an immersive installation that engages the senses in an overwhelming experience. A altarpiece painted with UV pigment colors welcomes the viewer in an enclosed, silent environment. All of a sudden the lights go out, the pigments are activated and the atmosphere changes completely. An electronic audio track […]
The Feeling of Being Looked At (2020) represents a poetic manifesto by Kate Mosher Hall. Hall’s artistic research deeply questions the act of looking and its relational implications, the meaning of observing and being observed and the bond that is created between two beings in mutual gaze. On Hall’s canvas, in front of the shadows […]
Serialmirrors (2020) by Elena Pizzato is a series of nine mirrors in which the reflective surface is covered with fur, damask fabric, studs, leather. Each one of these installations bears the name of a woman who over the centuries has been accused of murder, often brutal, and whose history has given rise to dark legends. […]
DADEA 01 (European Bison), 2021, by Carla Gannis is an augmented reality variation of a work from the Do Androids Dream of Endangered Animals (The DADEA series) print series, 2020. Gannis’s experiments with the AI tools are aimed at creating dream worlds and narratives in which to discuss crucial issues of our time, such as […]
Gauzy Green was presented during the Not at First Glance exhibition held in 2020 at the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. Coherently part of Silvia Mariotti’s ongoing research, the work differs from her previous photographic experiences in the inclusion of luminous neon, not an overall element – as in the case of previous […]
The blueprint on silk is one of the five pieces that, together with a video and thirteen prints on transparent paper, make up the Correspondence series. As the title suggests, the work is the result of the artist’s long-distance correspondence with a group of women who attend the Italian language school at the Presidio Caritas […]
Incontri in luoghi straordinari was created during the first Italian lockdown imposed against the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic: a natural need to communicate prompted Crispiani to write and send the same letter to sixty recipients, then combine the different responses in the manifesto and the small pieces of fabric that make up the work. […]
In REST, Michele Rizzo displays the different practices that characterise his research: dance, sculpture and installation. He was born in Lecce, in Southern Italy, and his origins play a key role in the structure of the work, with the tradition of religious ceremonies mixed with the contemporary profane experience of clubbing. The sculptures of four […]
The video Zeus Machine. L’invincibile (2019) by Zapruder Filmmakersgroup, a collective composed by Monaldo Moretti, David Zamagni and Nadia Ranocchi, revisits the twelve labours of Hercules from a modern perspective. The mythological hero – embodied each time by a different character – finds himself immersed in key places in the contemporary urban landscape – such […]
Altar IV is part of the series Compositions part I initiated by Niccolò Morgan Gandolfi in 2015. The artist defines the works belonging to this series as a “photographic performance”, a practice that does not end with the realisation of the image, but which conceals a long process of elaboration in which the photograph is […]
Exposure #141 is part of the homonymous series undertaken by Barbara Probst at the beginning of the 2000s. As part of this great photographic tale – whose stages are identified by a progressive number – the piece moves away from the group of works devoted to portraits and approaches the more poetic and enigmatic one […]
Fern (2020) represents the starting point for subsequent digital variations that Emma Stern executed in 2021. Making sketches and paintings on canvas – only avatar-like – inspired by cyberspace and then transporting them on the web is the practice that characterises her research. Her interest in technology and 3D has led Stern to investigate its […]
The Party Wall is a participatory performance by artist Corinne Mazzoli that reflects on the containment and restrictive measures of the social and private body and its relations within the urban space. “Urban fencification” describes all the practices of movement limitation, militarization of security, multiplication of surveillance cameras, construction of physical and architectural barriers that […]
The series UNTITLED by Claudia Sinigaglia is an analysis of the dynamics of human aggregation: the project includes a series of pencil drawings on paper that portray crowded situations on the occasion of social events or appointments of daily life: football matches, vernissages of exhibitions, moments of waiting for the subway, summer days on the beach. The […]
“Who owns the future? Who benefits from the idea of the future? “ Pest to Power (2019) by Natasha Tontey is an antispecist manifesto in which cockroaches are presented as a possible model of non-human animal life from which to learn the survival dynamics of the species. Pest to Power is a multidisciplinary project and installation that includes […]
The Other Shape of Things is the title of two ongoing sculptural projects by artist Emilio Vavarella produced through various technologies and techniques, including 3D-scanners, data manipulation and 3D-printing. The Other Shape of Things – 1. Failed Objects (2017-ongoing) is a collection of so called ‘failed objects’: 3D prints collected by Vavarella saving them from […]
Everything I Know is a project by Mariagrazia Pontorno that retraces the voyage by boat that Leopoldina of Austria undertook to Rio de Janeiro in 1817 to marry Don Pedro of Bragança and become empress of Brazil. The trip was also attended by artists, scientists, botanists who had the task of conducting research in the […]
Picture from an other image by Giulio Saverio Rossi is an ongoing series. Not only because the series is actually unfinished, but also because it is a dialogue of translations between analogue tools and digital media. The first work of this series in fact depicts an enlarged detail of a previously created painting and is […]
Storie Adeane – Headean Stories by Elisa Strinna is an artificial landscape animated by cables, pipes and ceramic sculptures that cross walls and ground without interruption. The elements of this ecosystem seem to put two dimensions in communication, one visible, that of the viewer, and one that is not evident, hidden, underground. The cables, the […]
What we know about the world has been delivered to us through media, and for at least the last five or six years, the smartphone is the foremost among them. What Lilly Lulay is interested in analyzing is the way in which our smartphone has changed our approach to images and the consequences on the […]
Merch Mulch (2017) records an exploration inside an abandoned, semi-destroyed shopping center, in an atmosphere that closely resembles the settings of war videogames. A characteristic of the aesthetics of the video game is also the frontal view with which the space is shown, the post-apocalyptic atmosphere created by neon lights, an alienating musical background, the […]
Kurasoushchyna, my love is a declaration of love of one’s roots. Kurasoushchyna is one of the dormitory districts of the city of Minsk, where Masha Svyatogor was born and raised. Like all the suburbs, Kurasoushchyna is an anonymous place, homologated to the Soviet popular housing standard, grey, kilometres of concrete on kilometres of concrete. As […]
ED3N Temple is a hymn to the sacredness of the body and an invitation to both URL and IRL care practices. During the performance, the artist dedicates herself to meditation and yoga exercises inside a room covered in wood, illuminated by ultraviolet lights and full of orchids, phosphorescent phone covers and white towels. From time to […]
In My Desktop Decor * Relaxing * Molly Soda treats her desktop as one of the rooms in her house: while streaming from her actual webcam at home, she shares with the viewer all the steps of the renovation, that is approached as if it was a bedroom redecoration, with images of bedside succulents, a new funny […]
Tianzhuo Chen’s videos are real digital narratives based on solid technological architectures. Chen’s works include motifs and settings typical of virtual and 3D compositions, they build impactful scenes with disturbing characters that narrate dystopian scenes of our society. Chen orchestrates complex multimedia architectures, choral performances composed of fluorescent colours, masks, costumes and sounds. His videos […]
Trevor Paglen’s Octopus is an observation point from which to analyze the displacement that involves now our faculties of visions. Octopus is an apparatus, literally a digital a set of equipment, the artist uses to show us how easily we gravitate towards images. As part of his ‘Bloom’ show at Pace Gallery, London, Paglen places throughout the […]
Oscillation and metamorphosis are the track on which Kenta Cobayashi fights every convention on the fixity of photography. The artist appropriates the photographic medium to demonstrate the density and depth of the digital: Cobayashi’s actions, the ‘clicks’, on the surface of the image give body to otherwise immaterial concepts such as time and space. The […]
As we read on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the tragic event, Green Boots is the name used to indicate the unidentified body of a climber, probably Tsewang Paljor, who died on an expedition to Mount Everest in 1996. This body, where it was found and never moved, with its recognizable green boots, has become […]
In the analysis of what Internet-based art represents, there are three characteristics that appear most evident: the performativity of the medium, the freedom to choose to act in this specific context, the participation of the viewer, who is also the user. For This Unjust Mirror, Consant Dullaart creates hundreds of fake Instagram accounts, and then […]
Through the analysis of a vast and multifaceted visual archive, Kuijpers observed how in the narration of some contemporary events the psychic phenomenon of anxiety, social anxiety in particular, finds online the possibility of growing deliriously up to moment in which it breaks into offline reality, influencing the ways of representing and communicating the concept […]
Inconscio Idraulico is an artwork in progress. It is one of the sections of the Archivio Idraulico, an open photographic and video project built over years of research. Inconscio Idraulico is a project created by stitching together video fragments that come from actual video inspections of pipes, ducts and flues made by a plumber operating […]
Giovanna Petrocchi’s work reconfigures the terms of anthropological research to rethink the definitions of archive, catalogue and collection. Inspired by taxonomies adopted in collections of ancient art in Western museums, Petrocchi weasels her way into their timelines, tampering with sources, materials and stories, setting up these finds into new archaeological narratives. Through the appropriation of […]
Tokyo, a city of cyclic metabolism, sustained by its never-ending scrap and build. In 2018 Koyama launched his personal project, PHASE TRANS, through which he has continued to unfold works from his database of photographs capturing the ever-changing city by the employment of several varying methods. Revive is a series of resurrected images. The images, […]
Hornby Island is a northern Gulf Island, which sits within an archipelago, near Vancouver Island on the West Coast of British Columbia, Canada. Less than 12 square miles in size, its unique landscape shelters a population centred on simple life-styles, self-reliance and art. Seeming to sit slightly out of time, its counter cultural atmosphere was […]
A Crowded Apocalypse is a video and a series of photographs that document a complex operation, with deliberately surreal features. IO COSE, starting as they often do from the analysis of the relationship between man and technology, have resorted to Mechanical Turk, a platform devised by Amazon, which allows the crowd work force to be […]
One of the myths surrounding the Apollo Moon Landings is their supposed construction. That the giant leap for mankind was a well-polished hoax on the back of NASA and other organisations is a familiar line: one that permeates conspiracy theories across the planet. So perhaps it is not so strange that within any context of […]
SLENDER TIME by Marinella Paderni Things live a time of their own, dissimilar to human time, a slender time made up of minimal particles, elementary traces of its existing, deposits of a silent memory that doesn’t follow the course of History – the memory of cosmic physics and its agents which are repeated to infinity […]
Christto & Andrew have made their mark with images of a surreal nature, between dream and social criticism, on a borderline with the oneiric, dominated by bright and brilliant shades. Their images, always perfect, are the fruit of a unique creation, of a lively intelligence, capable of planning and realising an elaborate and captivating story for every photograph, just as in every […]
I would add that today it is virtually impossible to talk about anything without talking about numbers; we believe – often if not always – that the numbers can help us to understand, and obviously most of us have to believe in something for not losing the reason. We have codified the image and colour (as well […]
After the breakdown in relations with the USSR, in 1963 the Albanian military navy, obsessed by the fear of possible attacks to be launched at sea, crushed a Mediterranean sperm whale, confusing it with an enemy submarine. The animal was recovered and its skeleton housed inside the Museum of Natural History of Tirana, where it is still visible. The […]
From the past to modern times, both archeological research and modern aerial surveillance systems show that the areas of war in the Middle East have always been depicted as empty and nefarious. In particular, the media coverage during the Gulf War provided a series of images of hostile locations with no history and no people. Shadow Sites […]
An artist, at the beginning of his career, is often a redbreast. Most of the time he can be noticed alone and still, focused in defining the limits of his space and research. His energy, steady and inflexible, sparks around him diverting the flow of particles in the air; its chest seems to crumble and […]
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?” Surveillance Chess is a performance for a single and unusual recipient: the security staff’s surveillance monitor in its control position. Equipped with an interfering transmitter, the collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik hacks surveillance cameras in pre-Olympic London and illegaly assumes control, […]
The data we get from the online search engines are just a small part of the huge amount that populates the web. The project The Iceberg inspects the structure of internet, analysing in particular the deep web, where encrypted, illegal contents are shared and are kept invisible to Google’s search. The deep web is an […]
Dying Birds by Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt is a series of photographs on birds shot by hunters. The black and white images, often so blurry to make the shape of the animal least visible, don’t stay on particularly cruel and bloody details. The passing moment is though treated with extreme delicacy, with a poetic effort in […]
Everyone has something to share, but where does anything that has posted goes through the modern techological devices? What is the destiny of the Flusser’s ‘technoimages’? Giovanni Fredi is a young artist that decided to collect and appropriate, without asking any authorization neither to the interested subjects, nor to the effective devices’ owners, of the […]
The title of Massimiliano Gatti’s project was inspired by a recurrent expression in Pier Paolo Pasolini writings: in the essays I nomi o il grido della rana or in Se la pittura odierna potesse stimarsi di un genere poetico, the analogy between the dry and infertile desertic landscape and the existential human condition, often appears . Compared to the infinite shades […]
Il capo is one of the episode, together with Da Vinci (2012) and Piattaforma Luna (2011), of the trilogy The Malady of Iron, with which Yuri Ancarani reflects on the work dimension, telling realities usually hidden or poorly visible in the everyday life. In the video all the attention is focused on the head (chief) of the marble […]
“Anyone (…) is seen, but does not see; object of an information, never subject of a communication”. In these words is summarized the Panopticon idea, an ideal IIXth-century prison in which on only one only attendant is in charged of observing all the prisoners without making them conscious of the control action. Hasan Elahi seems to […]
An aphorism by the british writer Arthur C. Clarke in the essay of 1973 ‘Profiles of the future‘ states: «…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic». Automagic by Anouk Kruithof is a reflection on the possibilities expressed by the technological media in creating suggestions not ascribable to the rational context. Kruithof gleans from his personal archive a collection of photography made […]
In 1946, as part of a famous essay, Orwell wrote that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. Roughly sixty years after, during the Memorial Day weekend, the words “Existence or nonexistence” suddenly appear in Manhattan sky, quickly captured and uploaded on social media by random witnesses of the events, […]
The work The End [Action #5] by Andrea Galvani is part of a wider research, named The End Trilogy (2013-2016), that aims to enrich the experience of physical rules that govern reality, in the effort of re-define the thin boundary between visible and invisible. The video, reproduced through a golden macbook placed on a cement base, is […]
An exercise of portraiture, after the collaboration between Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno for ‘Zidande : a 21st Century Portrait’, k.364 depicts the hidden history of a musical pièce. It runs along the trip made by Avril Levitan and Roi Shiloach – two Israeli musicians of Polish descent – while they are coming back to the land their […]
There is still a long road ahead for the democratic promise of digital revolution and, like any other landmark change, it still has some dead zones. Christopher Baker’s videoinstallation, composed by more than 5,000 videos taken from online platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, reflects on this topic. All the videos are put together on […]
In Eric Baudelaire’s video [Sic.], a woman in a bookshop in Kyoto is reviewing all the items just delivered, censoring, title after title, all the details that cannot be seen. The technique used is called bokashi, which implies that, by using a bisturi, everything that can cause sexual excitement in the viewer is scratched and deleted […]
Pablo Bronstein, by using technical sketches that are the result of his studies in architecture, reflects on the principles of architectural design through history and on the power of large-scale planning for big projects. Every drawing, map or section realised by the artist are separated from their original function and the result seems to challenge […]
“They could easily be my stolen moments, yet I want to see more”. The Others is a slideshow including around 10,000 photographs, taken from different computers whose users were completely unaware of these being used. The images are projected with songs, as a soundtrack, that were taken from the same devices. From the technical point […]
Photographs, video, archival documents and audio recordings compose Martin Errichiello and Filippo Menichetti’s narration. The tale in the work In Quarta Persona (In Fourth Person) is told by different voices, aiming to retrace the recent events of Italian history. In particular, they are mapping the territory of Calabria region alongside the A3 Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway. […]
The book Illustrated People was realised by French artist Thomas Mailaender during a residency at the Archive of Modern Conflict, in London, publisher that is acquiring a huge number of photographs with the aim of representing conflict. His pages alternate the black and white reproduction of some images taken from the archive and the images […]
The relationship between vision and knowledge has never been as unstable and ambiguous as it is today. In the project Limit Telephotography, Trevor Paglen presents a series of distorted pictures, confused and abstracted; these represent secret military facilities that are displaced in remote areas of the United States, mostly invisible to the naked eye. In […]
The work realised by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in 2008, during a period spent in Afghanistan together with some British military units, is very different from the kind of photojournalism that is usually known. In this case, the two artists entrusted the soldiers with a lightproof box containing a roll of photosensitive paper, thus […]
The first images that naturally come to mind when we think about Austria are its monumental mountain ranges. In Thomas Albdorf’s photographies, however, the Alpes are just a pretext, a screen, a two-dimensional surface that serves as the background for other elements. In the project I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before, […]
A series of pink gloves focuses the spectators’ attention on seven pedestals with no sculptures. The gloves are worn by a team of performers who accurately describe the invisible shapes and let us perceive a specific image: a sculpture that is already part of our memory and emerges little by little in our mind. […]
If digital manipulation determined a loss in the credibility of the photographic medium, in some cases the opposite tendency can be noticed. After London’s disorders of 2011, the metropolitan police distributed a series of leaflets with low-resolution images of alleged criminals taken from CCTV cameras: these pictures immediately became proof of these people’s guilt, as […]
Light of God is an attempt to provide a visual equivalent to what the drone operator of Omer Fast’s Five Thousand Feet is the Best provides as ‘light of God’. It is a ray of laser light used in Afghanistan and in Iraq to aim the target for a missile, which is visible only with […]
In No. 235 / Encyclopaedia of an Allotment, Anne Geene reflects on the contemporary trend of photography to focus on the smaller details (rather than on the overall view) of the phenomena under analysis. The title of the project refers to a small lot of land in the outskirts of Rotterdam, one of the most […]
In 1749, John Rocque realised a formidable mapping oft he city of London by combining the most traditional techniques for topographic survey with experimental ways of measuring the space. In 2010, Sohei Nishino walks through the streets of the English capital, accumulating a number of pictures in order to create his own map oft he […]
Hidden Islam is an accurate map of the temporary houses of prayer that the Muslim population improvised in Northern Italy to deal with the difficulties of getting official permissions due to the adverse political situation. The author, Nicolò Degiorgis, inspects these spaces from two points of view, which are mirrored also in the publication: black […]
Antonio Ottomanelli, attentive towards the dynamics between the individual and the public space, in Big Eye Kabul raises his gaze. In his pictures, he shows the dirigibles used by the US army to control the occupied territories. In this overturned gaze, who usually observes is now observed, and in this momentary role reversal is possible […]
Penn Hills Resort, Pennsylvania. A sense of sweetened anachronism emanates from the images of Juno Calypso’s series The Honeymoon. Joyce, the artist’s alter ego, is immersed in the solitude of the hotel room – a place mainly frequented by couples during their romantic vacations. Surrounded by outmoded furniture and soft coloured wallpapers, the young woman […]
Daisuke Yokota has presented the serie ‘Matter‘ to the public as an immense installation using 100,000 photographic prints, emphasizing the texture and materiality of photograph surfaces by mass-printing images from photo books and ordinary life on rolls of paper and solidifying them in wax. ‘MATTER / BURN OUT’ is an extension of the work series ‘Matter’ […]
Compleanno (Birthday) is a diary for images that the artist Marilisa Cosello has imagined as description of her multiple personality, finding five characters that represent five different people living inside her, telling the origin, the present and the future of herself : The Bride, The Lover, The Man, The bourgeois woman, The Two Children. Birthday is the day […]
“Some time ago, browsing through old photographs in a flea market, two group portraits caught my eye. Of the eight women in the first photo, six appeared in the other photo as well. I recognized them from their faces not their dresses, which were different. No clue as to what photo was shot first. On the reverse […]
South-African artist Mohau Modisakeng uses self-portrait, in the forms of photogrpahy, video and performace, to propose his own reflections on the imagery that surrounding the black body, particularly the South-African one. A body that is inevitably connected to the ideas of violence and linked to the crimes of apartheid and racial segregation that was in […]
From 2013 Marco Signorini has been working on the potential power of digital technology, driving his research into the fertile land of a new reality that performs the universe we inhabit. His method, tranfert from the computer, considers the digital as a constitutive part of the image. As in the combining game of the anagram, […]
Nurtured by emotions and feelings such intimate than can’t find suitable words, Manon Wertenbroek‘ work literally creates, models the images through a material and multi-layered intervention, where clay and paper become sperimental medium and the space could be concurrently lived and perceived. In this necessity of gift back a materiality to the inner energy, the sculpture acts a vital […]
Rain is one of the most recent projects by Japanese artist Yoshinori Mizutani, that shows the streets of Tokyo from a totally new point of view. Characterized by strong contrasts of the colours of the objects in the images, like umbrellas or cars, and the alternation of blacks and white of the zebra crossings, which […]
The experience in advertising of artist Dominic Hawgood, who now lives and works in London, is at the origin of his construction of images. Using a similar language in terms of light, digital manipulation and post-production, Hawgood aims to inspect the limits of perceptions, the spiritual/religious ecstasy, and the alterations of the mental status of […]
“I thought it would be relevant to ironically use photography to convey absence – a media often, and almost automatically used to reframe memory. The whole point of the project was to maintain the idea of a ‘hole’ in the picture, symbolizing the hole in the family. Using pictures of a family without a dad on […]
“The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient spirit accepted phenomena with bad grace. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and […]
The work of the artists Christto & Andrew, born respectively in Puerto Rico and in South Africa, deal with the topics of national identity and history of a specific place. In particular, they take their inspiration from Doha, the city in Qatar where they currently live, which in a few decades witnessed a quick growth […]
Felicity Hammond is a young british photographer, that for many years has been dealing with photography in a broader sense, experimenting surfaces, matters and print on various materials. In the project ‘ The Language of Living ‘, composed by a wide range of expressions – from installation to performance – the artist has appropriated the digitally rendered architectural propositions […]
Discipula collective, through this body of works – that is more conceived as on operation than a single work itself – becomes part of the dialogue dealing with the valuable side of the images and how memory and the usage of intangible data could be preserved. From a source-image, in specific from the render of […]
These flowers sat between powerful men as they signed agreements designed to influence the fate of the world. (Taryn Simon) This series by the american artist Taryn Simon has been presented in various occasions and different shapes: as photographic project, as a series of sculpture and as an artist book, edit by Hatje Cantz. The […]
The photographer Laurence Rasti was born from Iranian parents, but lives and works in Switzerland. Inspired by her double nationality, her work reflects on topics such as identity, social belonging, and gender. There Are No Homosexuals in Iran, in particular, is a reflection on homosexuality in her country of origin. The title of the project directly […]
After a career in the graphic design, the Canadian artist Sara Cwynar experiments now with photography, installation and collage, techniques that allow her to obsessively accumulate images taken from the pop culture – which she defines ‘vernacular’ – and successively to modify, merge them with other materials, and reinvent them in new compositions. The works […]
Niagara is a series realised by the American photographer Alec Soth between 2004 and 2006. The project is composed by pictures of the area surrounding the well-known waterfall. Millions of tourists visit this location every year, and this phenomenon led to the formation of a major number of motels and facilities dedicated mainly to those […]
Created after the Onna no Shashin (Female Photography) big wave that started in the 90s in Japan, in which an increasingly growing number of women photographers started appearing on the art scene, Tokyo Rumando’s self portraits claim back […]
The works of Excellences & Perfections by Amalia Ulman, which have been recently included in the shows Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern and Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery in London, seem to offer an answer to the question: ‘how can performance art change in the era of major spread of internet and social […]