wavefront
the exhibition at palazzo costanzi
Ian McKeever, Eaguru 6, 2013, 51 x 71cm, courtesy the artist.
Adrian Paci, The Column, 2013, video, 25’52”, courtesy the artist, kaufmann repetto, Milano, New York, Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Zurich.
WAVEFRONT
Irma Blank
Igor Eškinja
Emanuela Marassi
Ian McKeever
Adrian Paci
Alfredo Pirri
Nedko Solakov
Bill Viola
a Trieste Contemporanea production
sponsored by the Comune di Trieste
and the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia
curator Giuliana Carbi Jesurun
Trieste, Palazzo Costanzi , Sala Veruda (piazza Piccola 2)
opening reception Wednesday, July 20, 2016, 7 pm
exhibition dates: 20 July – 18 August, 2016
opening hours: Mon-Sat 10.00-12.30 / 5.00-7.30; Sun 10.00-12.30; free admittance
A hot summer of cultural events in Trieste will be enriched by WAVEFRONT, an international exhibition of contemporary art which will show an extraordinary collection of works, including some historic milestones of contemporary art. Among these there is the videotape Chott el-Jerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat), 1979, by Bill Viola, which fittingly opens the show. Filmed almost forty years ago by the great American artist, mirages in the Sahara Desert and the dazzling snow in the North American prairies test the physical and the psychological perception of reality, bordering on hallucination. These images have become world video art icons and, in the exhibition, are proposed as the access key to a contemporary glance into the emotions of the vision of an art work.
With the support of the City of Trieste and the Trieste Contemporanea Committee, organiser of the show, WAVEFRONT opens Wednesday, 20 July, 7 pm, at Palazzo Costanzi (piazza Piccola 2) – one of the most curious buildings of neoclassical architecture that makes up the city, from which Piazza Unità d’Italia can be seen as well as the sea through the loggia of the Town Hall.
In the Municipal Exhibition Hall works by Irma Blank, Igor Eškinja, Emanuela Marassi, Ian McKeever, Adrian Paci, Alfredo Pirri, Nedko Solakov and Bill Viola will be exhibited until 18 August (opening hours: Mon-Sat 10.00-12.30 / 17.00-19.30; Sun 10.00-12.30; free admission)
The exhibition selects a series of works, from among those on contemporary circuit that are already of a high technical quality and intense semantic complexity, in which it is possible to recognise a strong focus of the authors to agents, whether physical or conceptual, that is able to activate the viewer in a process of moving from a visual to an emotional condition.
The works in Trieste are in this sense examples of the same wavefront. As the curator Giuliana Carbi Jesurun says: “the aim of the exhibition is to perhaps identify, as one of the most formidable goals today for contemporary art, an up-to-date rendering of bringing the unstable back to equilibrium, the minimum to active resonance, the paradox to harmonic reception: that, actually, was always implicit in the task of “propagation” of vibrant/ordered complexity which in past centuries was asked from any form of our culture capable of making our minds and our hearts agree ….. and for which in the visual field the terms of beauty, classical, aesthetic “quid” were then used… ”
In response to this aim is the pulsating optic affectability of a writing not related to knowledge but to the being of the Ur-Schrift (2000-2006) by Irma Blank (Germany 1934); the non-boundary of protruding light and shapes in the Kindertotenlieder, (2015) dedicated to Gustav Mahler by Alfredo Pirri (Italy 1957), where the surface retakes its role as a purely spatial element; the act of seeing that turns into a mental experience for Bill Viola (USA 1951); the purity of abstraction, that blurs photography and painting, with which, in the Eagduru series (2013), Ian McKeever (UK 1946) develops the “proto-phenomenological” approach that had the word “window” Old English; the transformation of reality – a traveling ship and productive distortions of the global economy – into a place for “processing” the imagination, as in the video The Column (2013) by Adrian Paci (Albania 1969); the amazing soft modes in which time makes a true authorial passage in the unwritten papers of the Room with a view (2015-16) by Igor Eškinja (Croatia 1975); the ambiguity between the vanitas and the memento mori in the game of references that the same history of words and materials activates in the Casanova (1999) by Emanuela Marassi (Italy, 1937); the paradox of an inconsequential cyclic nature of the work-performance A Life (Black & White) (1998) with which Nedko Solakov (Bulgaria 1957) in 2001 astonished the audience at the Harald Szeemann’s Plateau of Humankind, constantly repainting white and black the same room for the duration of the 49th Venice Biennale.
Nedko Solakov, A Life (Black & White), 1998-present.
Installation view: Plateau of Humankind, 49th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2001.
Photo: Giorgio Colombo
Trieste, Studio Tommaseo (via del Monte 2/1)
Nedko Solakov in conversation with Iara Boubnova
Tuesday 26 July, 7 pm
this special event will celebrate the 2016 Franco Jesurun’s day
in conjunction with the exhibition Wavefront
Starting from the famous work by Nedko Solakov exhibited in the Wavefront show, a wonderful opportunity to explore directly with the artist his ideas about art and his important artistic career will be offered by Trieste Contemporanea Tuesday, 26 July (Studio Tommaseo, Via del Monte 2/1, at 7 pm). Mr Solakov is in fact expected to be in Trieste for a special conversation with the curator Iara Boubnova, an eminent Bulgarian critic and curator, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia, president of the Bulgarian national section of AICA, co-curator of important international events, including the Manifesta 4 and the 1st and 2nd Moscow Biennial, and organiser of Bulgarian national participation in numerous international biennials such as those of Venice, Istanbul and Sao Paulo.
Trieste Contemporanea.
Dialogues with the Art of Central Eastern Europe.
+39 040 639187
info@triestecontemporanea.it
www.triestecontemporanea.it