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The skin of the neck, slightly reddened, a very close cut, almost claustrophobic, the hair collected and still dripping as if the protagonist of Chiara Enzo’s canvas Nuca, B (2021) had just come out of the shower. Portrayed from behind, she is frozen in a moment of daily routine and thanks to perspective choices and […]
In March 2020, the Italian-Swiss photographer Pascal Greco had planned a trip to Iceland to conclude his No Cliché photographic project, the aim of which was to propose an unusual imagery by distancing himself from the usual representations. After the COVID-19 pandemic has inevitably blocked his journey, Pascal Greco finds in the video game Death […]
From the white wall leather hands offer to the observer a bouquet of flowers, a beautiful composition, a tribute to the extremely romantic still life of the Dutch artist Rachel Ruysch, whose organic component is however distorted. Sottobosco (2021) is the sculpture by Rose Nestler in which the flowers seem to be covered by a […]
Undaria pinnatifida is the alga from which the project of the Lithuanian artist Robertas Narkus begins: working on the city of Venice with the intention of creating a site specific project, the artist has focused on this plant that is colonizing not only the Italian lagoon but also international waters due to globalization and the […]
If in some cases the concept of mirror indicates practices of mirroring the self through which to reflect on the possible iterations of the body between real and digital, it is possible to trace further methods of interpretation that identify vanishing points in the reflective quality of the mirroring surfaces that open onto simultaneous perceptive planes. […]
In 2018, video artist and VP Joe Sabia, from the creative section of Condé Nast, gives life to the very successful series 73 Questions With… for Vogue. Each episode centers on a single celebrity, who is asked quick questions – 73 precisely – and usually takes place in their lavish mansions, where Sabia follows the […]
Turn Me On Please, no more of that kind of stuff is the title of Sylvie Fleury’s solo exhibition at the Agnelli Art Gallery: Revolver, a work from 2009, fits perfectly into the ironic and allusive vision of the exhibition that the artist proposes, as a slogan and as a provocation. A gun, placed on […]
“I saw a vision in my sleep So turbulent and full of dread, That ill-forebodings fill my mind And o’er my heart theor poison spread.” These gloomy words, foreshadowing an impending disaster, taken from the poem Snake Eater by the Georgian author Vazha-Pshavela, clarify and highlight the semantic system of Raised in Dust (2021) video […]
Paradise Found (2018) is the first machinima created by fashion photographer and digital media artist Lisa Carletta, whose practice investigates the concept of identity declined between digital form and performative sphere. Paradise Found examines the processes underlying the disintegration and reconstruction of the self, body and digital replication. To highlight the dynamics of representation in […]
Two challengers look into each other’s eyes, ready to pounce armed to the teeth. The two cannot be more different, one in soldier’s armor with a metal helmet, the other a slender purple figure without any protection on his body, armed only with his fists. Chris Wright, through the video game Dark Souls III (2016), creates […]
On a three-by-four meter base, the artist Jana Euler has placed 111 small white sharks in glazed ceramic: the ferocious heads of these animals seem to emerge from the sea water ready to tear their prey to pieces with their sharp teeth and bloody eyes. Great White Fear (2021) is part of the installation conceived by […]
On a large wooden laptop we see, painted on the screen, two angels wedged in contortionist positions while playing with a ball of dust that they keep on a leash. Behind this surreal scene, between the surprised and the petrified, a couple just got out of the car observes them as comets fall over their […]
It is said that finding a wife or husband in China has become a real competition, so much that new schools and courses have sprung up in which they teach men various seduction techniques to get the wife of their dreams. The so-called PUAs (acronym for pick-up artists) are individuals who study and adopt techniques […]
A rabbit woman, lying like a Renaissance Venus, looks with her wildflower eyes towards the ceiling, lost and worried. Her body, made with tobacco held together by nylon stockings, is completely naked to the observers, on her bust the big breasts narrow the gap between the human and the animal figure. The legs are bent, […]
Eine Frau riest durch die Welt is the title of the novel by the Hungarian and German-speaking writer Maria Leitner, who went down in history for being one of the first women to report undercover and fight against Nazism through her writings. This book was part of the list of books that the German National Socialist […]
“Mirror Mirror in my hand, who’s the cutest in the land??” sings Mimi contemplating her reflection in the mirror. But instead of giving her the desired answer, the mirror traps her in an endless destructive loop in which Mimi tries “desperately to reach an ideal of beauty that is in itself impossible to achieve” (Maclean, 2021). […]
A long-eared fawn, its a little lost gaze, its paws inside a pair of trendy Uggs. It stands in front of a pink and white corridor in which bright Irish pub signs follow one another in a dilated and distorted room that ends with large neon Keystone Light. Jamian Juliano-Villani’s painting is the result of a sum of […]
A couple of Japanese tourists get on the plane to North Korea, as soon as they take their seat the girl begins her video story to document every detail of their journey. Following the couple’s movements, the camera captures the street to the capital Pyongyang, while the voice of a Japanese guide dispenses trivial and approximate information […]
Why should we search 17 reasons to put a stone in the bread? And above all, what might these 17 reasons be? What need is there to find reasons for such a rambling action? The Japanese artist Ookubo Ari, taking up an “ancient story of a peasant family reports”, creates an art installation in which […]
The curtain opens, the stage is empty, just a white almost threatening wall . In this silent atmosphere noises are produced by movements of people and objects: here appear the protagonists of Farm Fatale (2019), the hybrid and experimental work produced by Vivarium Studio and created by director and artist Philippe Quesne. Post punk scarecrows […]
In 1919 Thayaht, stage name of the futurist artist Ernesto Michehelles, presents the project for a new concept of dress: the T-jampsuit is a suit with extremely simple and geometric lines whose main feature was the comfort in clothing to facilitate movements. The Jumpsuit Theme (2022) of Sara Enrico becomes a tribute to the Thayaht’s […]
Tied to thin bamboo fishing rods, wooden dolls are hungging each other in different positions, some upside down, others crouched and almost sitting in the air, simulating positions with clear sexual references. The Thai artist Adisak Phupa takes up the centenary tradition of the Hun Nakhon Leo (the creation of wooden and paper puppets that […]
Ten identical men, dressed in white shirts and black trousers, a representation of some sort of ordinary man. The ten anonymous and replicating figures share and inhabit the space of a luxury hotel suite, whose large windows overlook the city of Athens. For twelve minutes, the duration of the video, Goldbach makes the protagonists move […]
A close up on a female ear shows unexpected signs: as tattooed on the skin the logos normally used within social networks now inhabit the surface of the lobe, you can recognize the heart of the likes obtained and the number of shares that the post has had . IMAGE 4, Julia’s Twitter 1 is […]
A small painting, without a title, is revealed as the fulcrum and synthesis of the articulated series of works that animate The Nature of Game, inside the Belgian pavilion within the Venice Biennale 2022. The series consists of videos, paintings, drawings and a small publication, almost as a storyboard model, in which everyday moments are […]
Sunset, 030 (2019), an oil painting made by Anne Imhof, represents a sunset that the artist turns for 90° of the classic landscape representation: the new verticality abstracts the subject and obliges the observer moves the head in order to recognize it. The monochromatic tones that tend to red, old pink, black and other shades of warm tones, […]
Boudica, historical and mythological figure of Anglo-Saxon culture, was the queen of the Iceni tribe and went down in history for her courage in facing the revolt of the British territories against Rome in the 2nd century AD. The image of Boudica is very popular in English culture so much that it is found in […]
Colors and figures crowd, as in a complex game of joints, the representation of an articulated scene which, by virtue of the formal choice of installation, makes the narrative interesting and mysterious. Illegal Spirits of Sámpi (2022) is the work in which Anders Sunna brings out the complex and dramatic history of the community of […]
“In 1974 at the age of six I began to hear the voices. I would appear glassy-eyed in the middle of the night in my parents’ living room in a somnambulistic state. ‘It’s the voices. Stop the voices’. It was difficult to describe exactly what I heard. This wasn’t just one voice, but a caco […]
The camera turns on, dominates the darkness but in the distance you can hear the beats of an unusual and very deep music, an almost tribal sound. The image appears: the director’s gaze is immersed in a group of people, the light is low and, creating deep and sharp light and shade, illuminates the center […]
A man from behind, sitting on a crate, traditionally used for carrying musical equipment, holds a guitar in his hand with which he generates distorted and long sounds, frequencies that run the risk of annoying the hearing so much that he has to provide the visitors with caps. But it is through this acoustic signal that […]
A body whose musculature is extremely trained, pectorals burst, veins emerging on the biceps, a cowboy hat on the head. The face of the posterized image of the body builder has, however, been covered by butterfly draw as a comics, the same that is repeated a few more times on the surface of the canvas. […]
Myxomycetes are a particular type of mould, unicellular organisms whose growth and life is formed by a continuous succession of stages and transformations. Spread all over the world and in very different environments, these organisms are the origin of Mimosa Echard’s research project started in 2019. The french artist , born in 1986, lives and […]
Sitting with her back against the wall, a wooden puppet seems almost intent on reflecting on the day just past and the future that awaits it, with a melancholy look almost of resignation. Observing the figure better we can recognize the characteristics that define its use: Untitled (Sex Robot) (2018-2019) is not a simple puppet […]
Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl, using the structure of the Austrian pavilion, have developed a project that connects the practices of the two artists through a game of quotations, references and parallelisms. Invitation of the soft machine and her angry body parts (2022) is the construction of a scenography in which different languages converge […]
The teeth, stained with lipstick, are grinded, in tension, it is almost possible to hear the noise of shrilling. The lips, curled in a grimace, define in a confused way a face of a woman with very sharp features. The eyes, weighed down by an eyeshadow, the unmade makeup of a long night, are closed, but […]
Zineb Zedira’s intervention begins even before entering the French pavilion inside the Giardini of the Venice Biennale: a plywood roof acts as an introductory tunnel to the complex staging operation that the artist has made inside the space of the pavilion. Dreams have no Titles (2022) is an installation that is built and deconstructed within […]
What remains of a dream? What fragments of reality, represented in the dream dimension, interact with us? How much space is given in the process of accepting these images? Zsófia Keresztes in her installation After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage (2022) tackles these questions without fear, diving into places of the imagination where […]
Two figures, perhaps two men or perhaps two women (but in the end it doesn’t matter), are captured while using what can be imagined to be a public bathroom: their mimic gesture and their unexpected presence seem to challenge gender diversifications and categorization of a place based on sexuality. We are in Barcelona and this […]
Sheree Hovsepian, an American artist of Iranian origins, pursues with her practice a hybrid approach between sculptural gesture and photographic image in the name of materiality. Different objects, made with different materials and different shapes, are assembled by Hovsepian within wooden frames, which are transformed into contemporary ‘drawers of wonders’ in which images of naked […]
As in a matrix animated by pixels and neon colors, Computer Comics tears apart reality to transport us into a digital dream dimension: the protagonists of this first 8-bit comic are men in suits, probably the alter ego of the components of the artistic collective Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, wandering through desolate places of cities and […]
A small hand delicately touches what looks like a human face but which, at a closer look, turns out to be a sculptural reproduction: Mama # 25 stages a disturbing mother-daughter relationship, declined in a series of 25 photographic prints. Grzeszykowska’s practice has an essential characteristic in self-representation, experimented with either video, photography, digital practices […]
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 […]