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Artissima 15

Artissima 15
November 7 - 9, 2008
Preview and Opening November 6, 2008

Lingotto Fiere, Turin

A FAIR EXPERIENCE

Artissima came to an end last November amid great acclaim from the media and the public. The Italian and international press talked about the fair in highly appreciative terms, describing it as an authentic breath of fresh air and innovation in the world of European art fairs. This success was fully borne out by the enthusiasm of collectors and gallery owners, who for the first time talked about Turin as the “ideal” place for business. Artissima has thus become a truly high-quality fair, concentrating on the works of young artists in a sophisticated cultural climate which is also relaxed and extremely pleasant.

The Fair is working on an even more radical and decisive comeback in 2008.

Artissima 15 will be radically new, with a new approach to the displays (new walls and lighting), to the cultural events (innovative exhibitions and activities both inside the pavilion and out) and to the hospitality (extraordinary gastronomic offerings in and around the fair, and an après-festival organised by the artists themselves with electronic music and happenings).

During the same week as Artissima, the T2, the Torino Triennale will be opening in town. Curated by Daniel Birnbaum this year, the exhibition looks all set to be an event of enormous interest, which will bring top-level visitors to the city.

To know more about Artissima 15 please visit our brand new website
http://www.artissima.it

Museu d’Art
Contemporani
de Barcelona

La Bandera, 2002.
Copyright: Lothar Baumgarten,
VEGAP, Barcelona, 2008

Lothar Baumgarten. autofocus retina
Until 15 June 2008

Produced by:
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Plaça dels Angels, 1
08001 Barcelona

http://www.macba.es

This monographic exhibition by Lothar Baumgarten, while not considering itself to be a retrospective, includes photographic works, sculpture, projection, wall drawings, books and film from the late 1960s to the present day—some of which is adapted in situ to the architectural conditions of the MACBA.

Autofocus retina is the name of this presentation, but it is also the title of configuration consisting of four diamond shaped mirrors connoting the diafragma of a camera lens, its photographic eye. Chromatic and geometric compositions are set within the more singular places in the museum, where architectural space is understood as if it were a blank page. Imago Mundi (L’autre et L’ailleurs), (1988/2008), a piece which transforms the museum’s glass facade into a prism and explores the pretension of photographic language to establish itself as a universal truth. Reflected and mirrored as a sundial on the museum interior, it is based on and reflects the Kodak printed-matter colour-separation chart Print your own colour patches.

Baumgarten is the author of a decisive photographic oeuvre and this exhibition displays two extended series of single and combined photographs —Carbon (1989) and Montaigne (1977–85)— together with three projection pieces: Unsettled Objects (1968–69), Ecce Homo (2002), and Fragment Brazil (1977–2005). In Carbon Baumgarten’s investigation is based on the description of the continent’s widespread railway system and its decrepit industrial infrastructure (which is often a masterpiece of engineering) implanted in vernacular locations within an ever-changing traffic and trading area. Carbon visualizes the complex and hybrid North-American landscape and the pragmatism of its use by industrial society today.

The presentation of the gelatin-silver prints of Carbon is combined with three out of sixteen typographical wall drawings, set in the typeface Franklin Gothic, which combine the names of North-American railroad companies. In their graphic configurations they reflect on the engineering structures of bridges, tracks and semaphores. Six vitrines are displayed with drawings and layout materials from the book Carbon and give an inside view of its production. The concept and typography of this masterpiece were created with the collaboration of Walter Nikkels.

Montaigne, Terra Incognita (1977–85) is named after Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Once again, Baumgarten associates the objectivity of the photograph with its impossibility to transmit essential sensations in the comprehension of an event. Single photographs go to form triptychs or five-part compositions, thus constructing the content of each particular piece. Words or names and colour bars appear on the mats of the prints, giving a whiff of time and the aroma of the place.

These series move the problems of photography forward and confronts the artist’s position with the objectivist traditions that dominate the current panorama of the medium. Truth, for the artist, is not the adaptation of an idea to the reality of an object, but rather the involvement of the subject who knows.

Termite Savanna (1969) is an ephemeral sculpture that makes the process of time manifest and visible through its materialisation. It is in constant change. It features horizons cut into wooden planks, pigments, light bulbs, cables and exercise books with drawings under pigeon feathers form the body of a landscape, that of La Gran Sabana. This piece was created long before Baumgarten worked in
South America.

In the Capella dels Àngels Ecce Homo (2002) combines geometric and chromatic elements with projected images. It reflects on Walter Benjamin’s Passagen Werk. The photographic survey took place in the medieval Tuscan towns of Montalcino and San Giminiano and the landscape of Crete.

This exhibition is, in fact, a notation in images, not unlike a musical score.

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
and Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Victor Burgin, Portia, dettaglio (dalla serie Tales from Freud), 1984
Copyright: Victor Burgin

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia
Alle otto. Solito posto & Voyage to Italy

http://www.bevilacqualamasa.it

Museo di Fotografia
Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo (MI)
Alle otto. Solito posto & Tales from Freud

http://www.museofotografiacontemporanea.org

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia
Alle otto. Solito posto & Voyage to Italy

9th May - 27th July
Opening Thursday 8th May 2008 at 6.30pm
The artist will be present
press@bevilacqualamasa.it

Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo (MI)
Alle otto. Solito posto & Tales from Freud

11th May - 7th September 2008
Opening Saturday 10th May 2008 6pm
The artist will be present
ufficiostampa@museofotografiacontemporanea.org

The Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa of Venice and the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea of Cinisello Balsamo – Milan present the first solo exhibition in Italy of the work of Victor Burgin curated by Filippo Maggia.

The event constitutes an important contribution to the recognition and promotion in Italy of a key protagonist on the international arts scene.

Victor Burgin, artist and respected theorist of the image both still and moving, was born in Sheffield, UK, in 1941. He became known on the international arts scene at the end of the ’60s as one of the founding fathers of Conceptual art, working both with photography and the moving image in his film works. His work draws inspiration and shows the influence of great thinkers and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michael Foucalt and Roland Barthes.

Victor Burgin has always developed his theoretical reflections alongside his artistic practices. Even when he started to couple his traditional photographic language with that of the digital and video image around 1990, he continued to add new elements to the theoretical debate thanks to his exploration of the new audio-visual technologies and his constant and careful reflections on the evolution of the media society. In his artistic production, Burgin exploits elements from a range of different fields of experience: from advertising to journalism, from art to psychoanalysis, from fashion to magazines. This gives his work the form of a meta-linguistic reflection, one in which images and text flow one after the other or clash against each other, and in which the conceptual framework never obscures the originality of the form.

The concept of representation is one of the key elements of his work. It is though representation that the individual puts together his/her own subjectivity, and it is again through this process that society as a whole takes shape and reproduces itself. This is the reason that leads Burgin to underline the importance of the concept of the “responsibility of the artist”.

The project that the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea of Cinisello Balsamo (Milan) and the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa of Venice have put together includes the artist’s producing a new video, Alle 8 solito posto, to be projected contemporarily in both exhibition venues. The video, inspired by the closing sequence of the film The Eclipse by Michelangelo Antonioni, brings together footage shot in Venice, in the outlying district of San Basilio, along with images gathered during a visit to Milan, around the Monte Stella area.

The Venetian venue will also host the presentation of the two series of photographs and texts which are part of the video-installation Voyage to Italy: Basilica I (2006) and Basilica II (2006). In Cinisello Balsamo, on the other hand, the series of photographs Tales from Freud, will be put on show, including: In Lyon (1980), In Grenoble (1981), Gradiva (1982), Olympia (1982), Portia (1982).

The volume published by Skira, Components of a practice, serves as a catalogue of the two exhibitions, featuring works and writings by Victor Burgin. The book is entirely different from the previous publications on Victor Burgin’s works, as despite the fact that Burgin is widely recognised not only as an artist but also as a theorist, a book has never before been published in which he turns his critical eye to his own artistic production. The proposed monograph is designed to fill this gap