Traces
Ibrahim Ahmed, Evgeny Antufiev, Silvia Camporesi, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Giovanni Kronenberg, Beatrice Pediconi, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti
curated by Marina Dacci
Medieval Civic Museum of Bologna
Palazzo Ghisilardi, Via Manzoni 4, Bologna
The exhibition presents a selection of works by seven contemporary artists exploring the notion of trace in their research. The exploration of this theme moves in several directions: architectural-naturalistic, historical, social and relational.
Stepping into an historical space opens up a range of imaginative possibilities because its heritage becomes both a trace and a clue to meld together new possibilities, new visions. The works of the invited artists are anchored to the cabinets and laid-out collections of Medieval and Renaissance artifacts in the museum rooms, to fragments and relics of ancient walls, to lapidaries and sarcophagi, with an approach based on assonance or visual steering.
In the work of these artists, the traces originate from research, but also from experiences that are grafted into daily events.
The history that marks the course of a social group or of a family becomes a pattern, a multiplying element of shapes and materials blooming one out of the other and involving strong socially-relevant fragments (Ibrahim Ahmed, Kaarina Kaikkonen).
Some invited artists have chosen the water as an inspiring element and as a medium per se. The symbolic value of water, in its transformative dimension, is well known. Thanks to water, reactivating and bringing out an image means de-structuring, cleaning and eliminating, to later add back something new (Beatrice Pediconi, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti, Silvia Camporesi).
The relationship with, and the experience of, Nature and Landscape - whether they are natural or not, but mostly antrophized, worldly but also “otherwordly” - leads to bypass the boundary between the real and the imaginative which the artist adopts to generate images and transform objects (Giovanni Kronenberg, Evgeny Antufiev, Silvia Camporesi, Nazzarena Poli Maramotti).
This speaks, on the one hand, of the manipulative fascination the artist undergoes in relation to the subject, while, on the other hand, of how much the same creative path moves based on assonance and personal memories leading to unexpected formal results.
In this process, Past (history and subjective experience), Present (creative process in progress) and Future (ability to generate something new) mix and recompose, resetting the concept of linear time.
The artwork has to do with rhizomatic thoughts and circular energies. Mystery potentially pervades every object, every material, every relic and can and should condition our gaze on the world and on ourselves.
Marina Dacci
ART CITY Segnala 2020 on the occasion of Arte Fiera
