Referring to the slogan written during the French May 1968 protests “Sous les pavés, la plage” [“Under the Paving Stones, the Beach”], this exhibition presents works by artists making generative gestures able to redefine our relation to reality.
May 1968’s slogan implied a promise that after the upheavals, after using the weapons offered by the city itself — paving stones — prospects for a better life could develop. On this occasion, the slogan has changed with a shift on the word ‘street’, which connotes an apparatus of well-established structures that can be manipulated in order to reach the promised beach. The pieces included show a coherency in their ability to exist and act within existing structures and while grasping to these structures, they also work outside of them.
May 1968’s slogan implied a promise that after the upheavals, after using the weapons offered by the city itself — paving stones — prospects for a better life could develop. On this occasion, the slogan has changed with a shift on the word ‘street’, which connotes an apparatus of well-established structures that can be manipulated in order to reach the promised beach. The pieces included show a coherency in their ability to exist and act within existing structures and while grasping to these structures, they also work outside of them.
Pieces in the exhibition deal with strategies like disruption and counter-narrative, creating new visions of everyday life, and making room for doubts about what is assumed as real or true, in order to create new conditions for visibility within the socio-political, cultural, and urban contexts. The memory of the Situationist International - who elaborated techniques involving a playful-constructive behavior and awareness of the urban landscape - is thus in some way present in the exhibition.
Furthermore, with a specific focus on post-conceptual-practices, the exhibition seeks to define a line running through different generations of artists who developed a reflexion on the state of things, by working with different strategies from intervention to subversive affirmation, institutional critique and political minimalism.
Underneath the Street, the Beach focuses on the here-and-now of works and initiatives by Italian artists who are strongly involved with the contemporary. How to be contemporary in such an overloaded historical context, and how to respond to the physical and mental presence of the past.
Artists: Yuri Ancarani, Francesco Arena, Ludovica Carbotta, Angelo Castucci, Danilo Correale, Luca De Leva, Tomaso De Luca, Giulio Delvè, Tony Fiorentino, Helena Hladilova, Renato Leotta, Beatrice Marchi, Liliana Moro, Maria Pecchioli, Alessandro Quaranta, Andrea Romano, Mirko Smerdel, Nico Vascellari, and Valentina Vetturi.
Catalogue includes interviews with and articles of: Cripta 747, GUM Studio, BOCS, Frau Frisör Fosca, Teatro Valle, Lavoratori Dell'arte, and Xing.
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| Visitor with Maria Pecchioli's Versus Player, 2012. Installation with sound; modified turntable playing a live concert record of pop-singer Claudio Baglioni back and forward to find hidden subliminal messages. |
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Install view: Nico Vascellari, Lago Morto, 2009. Installation, 16 videos of clandestine hardcore concerts in Vittorio Veneto, loud sound, audience pictures framed.
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| Alessandro Quaranta, Kames Te Pijas Kafa?, 2003. Video installation, documenting a conversation over coffee with a gypsy from the Roma community which setteled in Turin in 1980, and have been now kicked out. |
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| Back-- Ibid. Liliana Moro. Front-- Tony Fiorentino, Removed Some Bricks From the Street is a Sign of Revolution, 2009. Documentation of an action in six polaroids. |
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| Right-- Tony Fiorentino, Cleaning a Lamp for Street Lighting, 2012. Video. |
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| From left-- Liliana Moro, Articolo 1 and Home, 2011. Found objects, sound installation. Sculpture-- Francesco Arena, Struttura Articolata, 2012. Sculpture made of leaflets given out by the Red Brigade which are hold together by smoked cigars. Wall-- Mirko Smerdel, I Vostri Grattacieli, 2010. Series of 30 digital prints on paper, text was taken from a street tag in Napoli and over imposed on images of utopic and grand buildings. |
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| Left-- Tomaso De Luca, 100 Heads of the Hunter, 2010. Drawings on paper of decommissioned italian sculptures that lay in a garden outside of Rome. Right-- Beatrice Marchi, N˚5, 2012. Installation, plants that form a home-madeChanel N˚5 fragrance garden. |
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| Install view. Left wall-- Tomaso de Luca, The Sleepers, 2010. 6 pictures documenting the artist's action of introducing two decommissioned and forgotten male statues to one another in Rome. Far-- Lago Morto detail. Front-- Giulio Delvè, And if a double-decker bus crashes into us, 2009. |
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| Instal view. De Luca, Marchi, Delvè. |
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| Giulio Delvè, And if a double-decker bus crashes into us, 2009. Sculpture of ready-mades, love paddle-locks forcefully removed from their original place. |
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| Detail. Beatrice Marchi's N˚ 5. Roses, ylang-ylang, jasmine, vanilla, eucaliptus, and more. |
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| Instal View. On back wall-- Danilo Correale, Untitled (The Future in Their Hands/The Visible Hand), 2011. Six close-up pictures of the hands of U.S. House of representatives board members in oath during a hearing regarding the current economic crisis. To the right of each is its fortune as read by a famous palm reader. |
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| Right-- Detail of Renato Leotta, Untitled, 2012. A 100 Lira coin, obsolete now after the implementation of the Euro which did not impede an economic crisis. |
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| Install view. Straight back-- Luca De Leva, Catering Blotto, 2012. Sculpture, installation, performance. A secret home-made alcoholic mix was given to visitors inside the exhibition space during the opening night. It was a secret 'illegal' bar inside the otherwise drink-free atmosphere of the gallery where entrance with liquids is prohibited. An oasis, |
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| Install detail. |
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De Leva's Catering Blotto.Opening Night |
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| Front-- Helena Hladilova, Selfmade, 2012. Installation of live grass on the cracks throughout the galleries' floor. Artists to the extreme left dressed in black. |
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| One of the opening night performances. Beatrice Marchi, Storie di Opera, Medley, 2012. Three opera singers singing fragments of famous italian operas to the miss-tones the artist's grandfather does each time he tells a story about his childhood in Veneto, where he would hear conservatory students sing after school at bars, and where he first heard opera in his life. |
This is going to be great, artists from Moscow, and Switzerland at GUM.
Sat, 26th at GUM studio...
Systems of Order
Francois Dey and A.P.
Yakov Kazhdan
Andrey Kuzkin
Ksenia Peretrukhina
Anastasia Ryabova
Anna Shestakova
La nozione di istruzione si lega all'arte contemporanea che ragiona in diversi modi. Le istruzioni dell'artista creano ottiche per la percezione di un oggetto o diventano direttive per la produzione. Potrebbe anche essere inteso in modo diverso: un artista vede la realtà costruita come istruzione, mentre descrive lo stato delle cose individua i suoi elementi didattici, il sistema di ordine. In ognuno di questi casi vi è una sequenza di azioni, una narrazione. Questa piccola mostra con un grande nome cerca di attuare una ricerca che dovrebbe continuare.
The notion of instruction relates to contemporary art thinking in multiple ways. Artist’s instructions create optics for the perception of an object or become the directive on production. It could be also understood differently: an artist sees the constructed reality as an instruction, while describing the state of things in it and identifying its instructional elements, the system of order. In each of these cases there is a sequence of actions or a narrative. This small exhibition with a big name seeks to do a to-be-continued research in this field.
Opening 26 / 05 / 2012 h 6pm
Curated by Yakov Kazhdan
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