The Moderns

Castello di Rivoli  Torino
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
Arata Isozaki
Janet Cardiff  1            Evan Hollway
 
The Moderns
Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
The Moderns Is a group show which which explores the ways in which a number of artists are engaging with modernism and modernity round the world today. This exhibition will include sculpture, installations, projections, painting, drawing, and sound projects. It will present new and existing works by over 20 artists, including Haluk Akakce, Ricci Albenda, Massimo Bartolini, Ellsabetta Benassl, Taclta Dean, Tom Friedman, Liam Gihick, Arturo Herrera, Evan Holloway, Brian Jungen, Jim Lambie, Dana Martin, Julie Mehretu, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushlba, Jorge Pardo, Paul Pfeiffer, Susan Phlllpsz, John Pilson, Simon Starling, Sarah Sze, Piotr Uklanskl and Gary Webb.

"Today, a growing number of artists round the world are referring to modernism or using icons of modernity as narratives and fictions In their artworks. The digital world is Internationalist, as were the modernists; it aims to go beyond the local/global dichotomy, while at the same time achieving a reach broader than anything the modernists achieved. The digital mind is a project-based mind, encouraging a sense of ‘agency’, an ability to make choices and act, to have a point of view and a perspectival gaze, even within contemporary notions of multiplicity. Memory and Modernity are Intertwined (the ‘future’ Is a notion belonging to the past), and in some instances this Idea takes form in the use of the history of film as a medium and subject for cinema, after photography, has been the most outstanding innovative cultural practice In the Modern Age. In other instances, it is to the formalism of ‘high modernist’ art In painting and sculpture that artists are looking. For such artists, issues of form, color, composition and linguistic experimentation are topical. Science, absurd or useless science, as well as its fantastic variant science fiction, are also sources for many artists today, and are primary metaphors being used." (Carolyn Christov Bakarglev)

The exhibition will also include a sound section selected and organized by Anthony Huberman, including works by Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier, Farmersmanual, Bernhard Günter, Tetsu Inoue, Massimo, Kaffe Matthews, Carsten Nicolai, Yasunao Tone, Tu m’ and Carl Michael von Hausswolff.

The exhibition will be hosted in the Manlca Lunga building at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporatiea. This 400 feet-long space was renovated and opened to the public in 1998. Designed In the 17th century as a picture gallery, the long and narrow Manica Lunga represents an ideal early modern architecture, specifically dedicated to the viewing of autonomous artworks. This project is both classical and experimental, static and process-oriented. An aesthetic experience for the audience that will be sensorial and pleasure-oriented, as well as disconcerting and problematic.

 
Janet Cardiff
A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller

The Castello di Rivoli will present the first mid-career survey of the work of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff (b. 1957), including her collaborations with George Bures Miller. Originally curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York in 2001, and following a venue at the Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal (2002), this project is a newly designed exhibition for Rivoli and the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Cardiff’s work.Janet Cardiff is known for her complex ‘Walking Pieces’ and audio installations which she has been creating since 1991. Her works constantly shift between fact and fiction, the experience of the real and our projections, fantasies and desires. Her works are interactive pieces where visitors are asked to touch, listen, and often move through an environment which is shaped by our perceptions of the real and by the artist’s alteration of them. They explore the complexity and vertiginous nature of subjectivity in a highly technological world, as well as the constant need to negotiate between presence and loss of self, memory and experience, sensation and imagination. The exhibition will present all of Cardiff’s major indoor installation works, such as To Touch (1993), The Dark Pool (1995-96), Forty-Part Motet (2001) and The Paradise Institute (2001), which won the special jury prize at the Venice Biennale in 2001. The exhibition will also premiere a new work by Cardiff and Bures Miller.

This exhibition is presented with the collaboration of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and with the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of Canada.

 
 
Arata Isozaki
Electric Labyrinth

Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting Electric Labyrinth, a reconstruction of a multimedia installation originally created by Arata Isozaki in 1968, for the XIV Milan Triennale. Immediately destroyed during a historic occupation of the Triennale building, the installation was reconstructed by Isozaki in 2002 and can now be seen by the Italian public for the first time.

In 1968, the XIV Milan Triennale opened at a time when political and social tensions were at their height. On May 30th, during the press conference of the XIV Triennale di Milano several hundreds of artists, intellectuals and architecture professors from the Milan University stormed the Trierinale area and occupied it for the 10 days to come. By the end of the occupation, this historical exhibition of 1960s critical avant-garde architecture was almost completely destroyed. Although it looked carefully at the then nascent protest movement, the exhibition, within which the room designed by Isozaki represented one of the most noteworthy contributions, was completely destroyed.

Isozaki describes his project for the Trienrtale in the following words "I didn’t see the opening because it was completely taken over by these young artists and students protesting. At the time, of course, similar movements against the establishment were also going on in Japan. Because I sympathised with these protests, I tried to reflect them in my Triennale exhibit. I was given some space to create an environment, so I asked several artist friends to work with me. One is a graphic artist, KOhei Sugiura - one of the best, most creative graphic artists we’ve had in Japan since the war. Another is a photographer, ShOmei TOmatzu. And I invited a composer, Toshi Itchiyanagi, and asked him to create a kind of sound installation. My idea was to create twelve, very large curved panels covered with an aluminium surface on which numerous images were silk-screened. I chose from ukiyo-e prints about ghosts and terrible tragedies, and asked TOmatzu to find documentary stills about the atom bombs, rather than to use his own work. So, he brought a film and some pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One famous one is of a kind of shadow made on a wall at the time the bomb exploded. These were the images I put on the panels, which also moved anytime anyone passed through an invisible infra-red beam.

They would turn and suddenly you would see a ghost or a dead body, which completely involved you in the movement of these strange images. They almost all had to do with the tragedy of the war or the crisis in society. At the same time, there were also large walls, ten meters long and five meters high, very large walls, on which I made a kind of collage about the ruins of Hiroshima and the megastructure it would later become, which itself was in a state of ruin: a ruined structure on the ruins, which I titled The City of the Future is the Ruins. I was very much obsessed by these ruins of the future. I projected many images of the future city onto the wall. At the time, we didn’t have any kind of video system, just slide projectors with maybe five carrousels with eighty slides each, which meant a lot of images running through the projectors. We tried to show how the future city would itself constantly fall into ruin. This was on the moving panels, which, whenever they turned, would be accompanied by Toshi Itchiyanagi’s strange sounds. It was an odd feeling to hear them. I called the installation Electric Labyrinths".

The installation has been reconstructed with the support of Castello di Rivoli, ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechriologie, Karlsruhe, the Fundaçao Serralves, Porto and under the curatorial leadership of Hans Ulrich Obrist. Electric Labyrinth represents one of the most important chapters in interdisciplinary experimentation in the 1960s, within the context of a dialogue involving art, architecture, and music, and it proposes a direct engagement in themes such as war and social crisis.As Hans Ulrich Obrist writes: "Isozaki’s installation proposes a negotiation of and between different elements, which frame a world beyond the wars of images and the wars of disciplines, and encourage the viewers to look for other properties of images".