Swimming Pool
Liliana Orbach -Preludio de una danza
Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea
Swimming Pool
Elena Knox, Sissa Micheli, Liliana Orbach, Jaye Rhee, Debora Vrizzi
Le artiste invitate, Elena Knox, Sissa Micheli, Liliana Orbach, Jaye
Rhee, Debora Vrizzi, affrontano lo stesso tema , la piscina,
con linguaggi diversi come la fotografia e il video.
Sede
Muratcentoventidue-Artecontemp
Via G. Murat 122/b – Bari
Inaugurazione
Sabato 19 Ottobre, 2019, ore 19.30
Periodo
19 ottobre – 30 novembre 2019
Orario di apertura
Lunedì ,martedì e mercoledì solo su appuntamento
Dal giovedì al sabato, dalle 17.30 alle 20.30
Info
3348714094 – 392.5985840
Press
release
Muratcentoventidue
Artecontemporanea
Swimming Pool
Elena Knox, Sissa Micheli, Liliana
Orbach, Jaye Rhee, Debora Vrizzi
Galleria Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea is pleased to present Swimming Pool, a group exhibition
featuring works by Elena Knox, Sissa
Micheli, Liliana Orbach , Jaye Rhee and Debora Vrizzi.
The pool is powerful, effective
and eloquent symbol of the contemporary world. It is one of the most loved
places in the collective imagination, a favorite stage of cinema and
literature.
The exhibition is dedicated to the theme of the pool, seen as a physical
and mental place in balance between an artificial dimension and a natural condition.
The pool is full of meanings, even discordant: it is a symbol of luxury
but also of a rediscovered relationship with nature (water, the body: relaxing
and letting go), it is artificial and natural, container and space used for
freedom. It mixes sensuality, ambiguity (countless movie scenes, books, music
videos) and death (the corpse in the pool is another recurring symbol that
links luxury to despair, as in the work of Elmgreen & Dragset “Death of a Collector”).It also represents a space to go through (movement), or
to float (stasis), full and empty.
And it is present the water that for centuries has not ceased to
fascinate and inspire athletes, artists and ordinary people: crystalline,
restorative, now mysterious, immense and terrible, now intimate and familiar.
In the works proposed in this exhibition, the swimming pool is a
representative or symbolic element of undoubted significance.
Elena Knox, Sissa Micheli, Liliana Orbach, Jaye Rhee and Debora
Vrizzi deal with the same issue using different creative languages such as
photography and video.
Elena Knox is an Australian
performance and media artist in the field of communication media. After
obtaining her PhD at the College of Fine Art (currently UNSW Art & Design)
at the University of New South Wales in 2015, she began presenting creative
works highlighting the relationship between humans, icons and robots in Japan
and other countries.
Elena’s works propose and disrupt embodiments of gender, interrogating
how women are performed and perform themselves in the varied media and contexts
of our age.
In her artistic practice, she amplifies human impulses to totemism, idolatry, and
fetishism, by which we attempt to commune with parahuman phenomena, and
to push back against our ultimate loneliness in the galaxy. This endeavour
often harnesses the rapidly changing field of
emergent technologies.
Chinoiserie (Ode to Wuhan) documents an improvised, guerrilla performance by Elena in the swimming pool of Hongguang Jianguo Hotel in Wuhan, China. Elena was artist-in-residence at K11 Art Village in Wuhan when she found this pool and spa, advertised by the hotel as open and usable by guests.
Wuhan city has an optimistic, chaotic, old-meets-new, under construction/destruction atmosphere. Chinoiserie is the artist's attempt to find an entry point to cultural immersion, in a fast-flowing China awash with contradictions.
Chinoiserie (Ode to Wuhan) documents an improvised, guerrilla performance by Elena in the swimming pool of Hongguang Jianguo Hotel in Wuhan, China. Elena was artist-in-residence at K11 Art Village in Wuhan when she found this pool and spa, advertised by the hotel as open and usable by guests.
Wuhan city has an optimistic, chaotic, old-meets-new, under construction/destruction atmosphere. Chinoiserie is the artist's attempt to find an entry point to cultural immersion, in a fast-flowing China awash with contradictions.
Sissa Micheli masters the subtlety
and the suggestiveness of story-telling. Hers are poetic etudes
of elemental passion, everyday torments, intimate and rare moments of striking emotional intensity.
Micheli’s is a complex world of a strong cinematic quality where reality and fiction are accomplices in constructing a narrative structure of psychological drama. Sometimes autobiographical, sometimes based upon someone else’s experience as reported in a newspaper, these narratives of uncomfortable intimacy are autonomous fragments of a hard life.
of elemental passion, everyday torments, intimate and rare moments of striking emotional intensity.
Micheli’s is a complex world of a strong cinematic quality where reality and fiction are accomplices in constructing a narrative structure of psychological drama. Sometimes autobiographical, sometimes based upon someone else’s experience as reported in a newspaper, these narratives of uncomfortable intimacy are autonomous fragments of a hard life.
In a gentle, hardly
visible process of sublimation, Micheli iconises matrixes of basic human
relationships, thus providing the viewer with a dictionary of “received
emotions” that while universalised retain their sincerity and amazingly
powerful authenticity.
In the photo series I
think I got caught in a trap (2007), Micheli takes herself as
protagonist to the Villa Wierer (built by Franz Prey) in Chienes, South Tyrol,
erected in the 1970’s and slated for demolition in 2008. Micheli explores the
interior of this former status symbol of the Wierer family, which as a ruin can
be interpreted as a showcase of economic decline – a whole generation of South
Tyroleans quickly came into money and soon lost it.
Shortly before its
demolition in 2008 it became part of a story aesthetically and narratively
based on film. A dense pictorial narration arises that takes on real incidents
from the past and turns them into fiction.
Liliana Orbach is an interdisciplinary
artist, independent curator, teacher, coordinator of projects and international
events related to art. Born in Argentina, she lives and works in Tel Aviv. She
works in collaboration with artists, writers, musicians and artists and has
also been invited to curate video art programs and lecture in museums and
universities. Her work intends to be global, deals with topics that concern many
aspects of our existence in a subtle, yet severe fashion, suggesting points of
reflection on the complexity of the cultural and social dynamics of our
contemporaneity. Rather than using an opinionated approach, she leaves open
ends, enabling space for further analysis and discussion. In addition to working with moving images, she
works on the combination of visual with verbal language .
In Preludio
de una Danza what looks like a
fun time at the pool transforms into a tense situation in which the water’s
looping rhythm seems to control its flow over the apparent freedom in which the
swimmers are moving. Humanity’s desire to take over nature could turn into a
dangerous game of unpredictable outcomes. The artist reminds us that humanity’s
life flows, within the boundaries of nature's powerful
kingdom.
Jaye Rhee revels in the space between the ironic and the
poignant with work that simultaneously incorporates video, photography, and
performance. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Rhee moved to the United States where
she lives.
She presents an installation entitled Swan
. Her work explores the evasive nature of authentic desire. By
focusing on the tension between “real” desire and “fake” objects of desire, as
embodied by images—in the broadest sense of the word— her work presents “real
fakes” and “imageless images.”
For example, in her public bath house series,
Swan, Polar Bear, Niagara, performers move in public baths against a background
of wall paintings depicting swans in a lake, a North Pole scene with polar
bears, and the Niagara Falls. These scenes exist in words, as well as in
collective memory shaped by culture. But where do they actually exist?
The swan, the polar bears of the North Pole, and the Niagara Falls, all exist
without existing: they are idealized images of the nostalgic imagination.
Her goal is to
create a new visual space in which artifice evaporates through the very naked
presentation of images as naked materials. This “honest artifice” would
ultimately lead one into an experience of reflection about one’s own nostalgia.
Debora Vrizzi is an Italian video artist and cinematographer.
Over the years, she has been focusing on cinema and
video art. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and the
Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (2006) under the direction of
maestro Giuseppe Rotunno. During her studies at CSC, she learnt how to use the
light to develop and assist narration.
As a performer and filmmaker, Debora Vrizzi has always
worked with images, movement, photography and the human body in order to
display a reflection on personal and collective identity. This purpose has been
reached by using semi-narrative structures and/or a symbolic-conceptual
structure. Besides, she sometimes turns on a more realistic way of exposing
this reflection, by choosing the documentation of the real life and the
autobiography.
Her artistic projects have two main directions: the
first one is characterized by playing with her own body that becomes the main
character of her works. This way of performing is strictly based on a
cinematographic system. Therefore, her living paintings are real «mises en
scène». The second direction is utterly different. In fact, she chooses to
focus on the cinema of reality.
In Frame Line, the artist
revisited the myth of Penelope and the Ulysses’ journey. In doing so, she aims
to describe the expectation and the conceptual and physical thickness of
feelings. Hence, she reflects on the tangled and ineffective strategies of
Love.
Penelope is patiently
waiting for Ulysses, whereas the hero has been enchanted by the Sirens and
decides not to go back home. The lady sews her hairs like a spider's web, in
order to make her never-ending waiting seductive. She does not want to leave
her throne. The wind wraps her in the air. Its breath seems to blow even in the
water, moving Penelope’s skirt in a sort of dance. Frame line is the space between one frame and another. It is the
line that divides feelings from reason. It is the empty and apparently immobile
space of the waiting.
Venue
Muratcentoventidue-Artecontemporanea
Via G. Murat
122/b – Bari (Italy)
Opening Saturday October 19 , 2019 at 7.30 pm
Period October 19– November 30, 2019
Opening hours
Monday ,Tuesday and Wednesday only
by appointment
From Thursday to Saturday 5.30 - 8.30 pm
Info 3348714094 – 392.5985840
mailto:info@muratcentoventidue.com"
http://www.muratcentoventidue.com"
Elena Knox was born in Australia, lives between Japan and Australia.
Knox’s works are presented in première
venues internationally. Recent shows include: Video Art and
Experimental Film Festival, New York; Beijing Media Art Biennale; Nine Tomorrows, PowerLong Art Center Hangzhou; Beholder, Hong
Kong International Commerce Centre (ICC) 118-storey façade; Algorithmic Art, Hong
Kong City Hall; International Symposium on Electronic Art; Athens Digital Arts
Festival; Cairo Video Festival; Simultan Festival Romania; Festival Silêncio
Portugal; Video Vortex (Kochi Biennale).
Knox’s experimental projects are nominated for various awards, recently Australian Art Music Awards and LA Underground Film Forum. She is a research fellow in Intermedia Art and Science at Waseda University, Tokyo.
Knox’s experimental projects are nominated for various awards, recently Australian Art Music Awards and LA Underground Film Forum. She is a research fellow in Intermedia Art and Science at Waseda University, Tokyo.
http://www.elenaknox.com
Sissa Micheli was born in 1975
in Brunico in Italy. From 2000 to 2002 she studied at the Schule für
künstlerische Photographie in Vienna under the direction of Friedl Kubelka and
completed her diploma studies between 2002 and 2007 at the Vienna Academy of
Fine Arts with Professor Franz Graf, Professor Gunther Damisch and Professor
Matthias Herrmann, graduating with honours. Sissa Micheli was awarded several
prizes and grants, including the Vienna Academy prize and the Premio Pagine
Bianche d'Autore, Milan, in 2008, the London and Paris studio scholarship by
the BKA in 2009 and 2013, and the Austrian state grant for artistic photography
in 2015. In 2016 she was awarded the “Artist of the Year” prize by the South
Tyrol Artists’ Association and the HGV. Her work has been shown in numerous
national and international individual and group exhibitions and is represented
in public and private collections. Sissa Micheli lives and works in Vienna.
Liliana Orbach , interdisciplinary
artist, independent curator and lecturer. Born in Argentina. Lives and works in
Tel Aviv, Israel. She completed her PhD in Arts at the Multimedia department of
Poznan Art University, Poland after earning her Master of Arts Degree at the California
State University, Fullerton, U.S.A. Among her solo shows: Dot.to.Dot. project.
Installation at Wschodnia Gallery. Lodz, Poland (2019); The Eureka Bliss.
Installation at Artspace Tel Aviv, Israel (2015); Oasis Edge. Installation at
the II International Art Biennial - Buenos Aires. National Museum of Fine Arts.
Buenos Aires, Argentina (2002); Among her group exhibitions and international
events: Dot.to.Dot. project. Video installation at Tetramatyka - International
media festival. Lviv, Ukraine (2019); Transit Message - International mixed
media project. Bergamo, Italy (2018); For Members Only. Video work at KOLNOA - Israeli Film Festival. Prague,
Czech Republic (2018); Di Libe Brent a
Shrek. Video work at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017); What has risen may
sunk and what has sunk may rise. Video installation at the Artists' House - Tel
Aviv and WRO Atelier. Wroclaw, Poland (2013); Goldberg Variations - A different
Outlook. Video art and live piano performance. Tzavta auditorium. Tel Aviv,
Israel (2008); Videoformes - International video festival. France (2005-07);
Video work at The Colors of Water - Exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel
(2002-04); Installation at Markers, Art and Poetry in Venice. The 49th Venice
Biennial, Italy (2001).
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jaye Rhee graduated from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, MFA).She lives and works in New York.
Her work has since
been exhibited at various international venues, including Albright Knox Art
Gallery, Norton Museum of Art, Queens Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts,
Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Kobe Biennale 2007, The Seoul Museum of Modern Art,
DOOSAN Art Center (Seoul), Gyeonggi Museum of Art (South Korea), Leeum Samsung
Museum (Seoul), the Centro para os Assuntos da Arte e Arquitectura (Portugal)
and La Triennale di Milano (Milan).
Rhee also participated
in the Artists’ residencies of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in
Main 2009, Palais de Tokyo Workshop Program in Paris 2009, Changdong
International Studio Program in Seoul 2008, Aljira Emerge Program at Aljira
Center for Contemporary Art in New Jersey 2008, Artist in Market Place Program
in Bronx Museum in 2005 and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space
Program 2012.
Among her awards are
the Yonkang (DOOSAN) Art Award 2011, Franklin Furnace Fund 2010, SeMA Young
Artist Grant from Seoul Museum of Art 2010, Arts Council Korea Grant for
Cultural Exc hange 2010 and 2009, and KoreaAmerica Foundation for the Arts
Award 2008.
Rhee also participated in the Artists' residencies of Delfina Foundation in
London, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Main, Palais de Tokyo
Workshop Program in Paris, Center for Art & Architecture Affairs in
Northern Portugal, Changdong International Studio Program in Seoul, Aljira
Emerge Program at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in New Jersey, Artist in
Market Place Program in Bronx Museum and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing
Space Program.
Debora Vrizzi (1975, Cividale del Friuli) an Italian video
artist and cinematographer. As a director of photography, Vrizzi brought her
works to many international festivals, such as Cannes Festival, Venice Film
Festival, Berlinale and TIFF.
Her video artworks have been shown in personal
and collective exhibitions such as: Videoart forum, AlbumArte, Rome, 2019;
Fuori Norma, MACRO Asilo Museum, Rome 2018; Artist’s Film and video in Italy
from The Sixties to Today, MAXXI Museum, Rome
/ Videoart Yearbook, Bologna 2017; Ibrida, Festival delle arti intermediali,
Forli 2015; Maravee corpus, La Loggia
Gallery, Capodistria, Slovenia; Mise en scène, with Wang Qing Song, OffiCina
Gallery, Beijing, China 2009; Mise en Abyme, 3g Gallery, Udine; Pitti Immagine
Award, for IT’s International talent support Photo # Seven, Trieste, 2008; 91°
Collettiva giovani artisti, Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation, Venice, 2007.