PRIMO PIANO LIVINGALLERY

ID-ENTITY R-EVOLUTION: BODIES-NATURANS, TRANSITS AND CYBERSPACE

Primo Piano LivinGallery opens in 2022 with the contemporary art exhibition

ID-ENTITY R-EVOLUTION: BODIES-NATURANS, TRANSITS AND CYBERSPACE, curated by Dores Sacquegna  and set up in Lecce at the Palmieri Foundation from 19 to 31 March 2022.   Opening Day Saturday 19th March at 7:30pm, with the Mayor Carlo Salvemini and the artist of Light Art, LeoNilde Carabba . The event is under the auspices of the Department of Culture of  Lecce’s Municipality.

The exhibition

Fifty years have passed since “We are the Revolution”, by Joseph Beuys, with which the artist invites the viewer to choose which side to be on. This sentence becomes the leitmotif for a multicultural project that crosses spaces between physical and virtual identities, between cells and bits. ID-ENTITY R-EVOLUTION, plays on the words of body-entity and revolution-evolution, through three distinct sessions of which: bodies-naturans, transits and cyberspace. Between web-identity and physical identities, the exhibition investigates the way in which technologies have transformed our lives, the ways in which we manage social media and cultivate our relationships and interests.  A generational and multicultural dialogue that compares twenty artists from Europe, Asia, the USA, the Middle East and who reflect the thought and identity of this so chaotic and overwhelming era, giving us the testimony of the dangers to which mankind is it is voluntarily exposed, to satisfy one’s thirst for knowledge and one’s desire to overcome all limits.

The artists

In Bodies-Naturans, we find the relationship between natural landscape and the human body, in the works of the Human Nature series by Martin Fahlen. Natural elements and hybrid identities in the works by Dena Haden.Guiding animals and the duality between human nature and wild nature in the transgender works by Angioletta De Nitto. Identity and memory in the talisman-book by Cynthia Ruse. The cliché of beauty between subtraction and contextualization in the works by Steffen Blunk. Glamorous bodies and organic pixels, respectively for the artists Astolfo Funes and Anna Wode.

Transits session begins with the social sculpture “Lotta Continua” by the German artist Joseph Beuys, an Italian Communist newspaper, used in correspondence with his friend the publisher Klaus Staeck. “When I write my name, I draw”, said Beuys and by affixing his signature, the newspaper becomes the emblem of a concept of total art and of the here and now. His artistic production, characterized by poor materials, has a profound symbolic and autobiographical value. The international consecration of the artist is in 1979 when the Guggenheim Museum in New York dedicates a major retrospective to him. Art becomes revolutionary when it is used as an instrument for peace, freedom and respect for nature and the other. The 1970s were also a crucial decade for Italian artists committed to deconstructing and subverting the idea of ​​femininity and the body, denouncing the subordinate position of women in the world of work. Despite the economic crisis and the militant clashes of opposing factions, feminism in Milan reached a year of particular importance called “The ’68 of women”, where women’s movements involving artists such as Carla Accardi, Nanda Vigo, Tommaso Binga, Mirella Bentivoglio and LeoNilde Carabba, artist of Light Art, here on display with the latest production dedicated to the “Cycle of Sirius”. Her work is identical in the identity-to-space and to-time, with tributes to Vera Rubin for “Hymn to the Dark Matter” and to Tommaso Campanella for “The city of the sun”, and three other works dedicated to the earth, sun and to Mars. The characteristic of her works is that they are visible in day and night light with wood lights and total darkness. Carabba is an artist whose life is studded with numerous encounters with many international artists including Lucio Fontana and Carla Accardi, with whom she founded the “Cooperativa Beato Angelico”. Since 2015 she has been part of the International Black Light Paintings Group founded by Gisella Gellini, Gaetano Corica and Fabio Agrifoglio, President of Mario Agrifoglio Foundation. The concept of earth as a lifeline is present in the installation “Being Earth” by Guillaume Liffran, which creates patterns with milky figures suspended in space and raises questions on the themes of hybridization and migratory flows. Cosmogonies between the erotic body and the cosmic body with the work by Katelyne Ostyn; reconciliation with the ancient world in the female figures by Asli Kutluay. Temporary nature and trans-urbanism in the restless metropolis by Marijke Uittenbroek and finally, sub-cultures and ethnic groups in Andrea Fortunoff’s works with “Dance the Story” patterns and more.

Cyberspace, the third and final session of this event, has become the arena in which social relations are created between NTF images and QR codes. The rapid development of modern network technology today also affects art. The perception system of painting is gradually changing, and many invisible real existences are redefined by the action of the spatial magnetic field. The invisible life space contains endless energy. Identity in the age of cloning is the research of the internationally known artist  Pey-Chwen Lin for her augmented reality projects and installations. On display with “Making of Eve Clone Portrait IAR”, the clone of Eve which incorporates the facial proportions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s work, and which, through the QR code, materializes in 3D. Lin, describe them through the brushstrokes and color structure of painting. Her works deal with artificial bodies that reproduce with or without the interactive intervention of the user.  This project won, among others, the First International Prize “Lorenzo il Magnifico” in the New Media category at the 2019 Florence Biennale. The web expands the depth of our space of perception and between the physical and virtual state we find the phenomenological works by Ping He. Soulless mortal beings who collapse the biological datum in Akane Hiraoka‘s work. Between 70s punk provocation and cyborg style, the work by Manu De Mey. “Kontrolle Macht Frei” is the title of the performance by Massimiliano Manieri , on display with the video produced by MediFilm. The action is inspired by the motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free), placed at the entrance to the Nazi camps during the Second World War. In the meeting with the audience, the performer’s body becomes an anatomical and biotech atlas of human geography. The performance has a psychophysical character of denunciation against the control of the masses, on the mechanisms of social networks and cyberspace in which we accept to be monitored every day. Setting limits is the photographic work by Dario Manco who closes the circle of this event with the work “Limits”. The human being is no longer the measure of the world but the world itself is increasingly the measure of man.