MUSEION #10YearsOn

This constantly updated exhibition aims to present a range of topics that have characterized Museion's activities over the last few years, and in addition, these same topics will be presented anew to the audience as part of our exhibition program in 2018.

The idea of taking contemporary art out of the museum, to unexpected places, has led to Museion setting up a series of projects outside of its institutional venue. One of the first was the Piccolo Museion – Cubo Garutti in the Don Bosco neighbourhood of Bolzano, designed by the artist Alberto Garutti. Thanks to a series of collaborations and special projects with public and private partners - from the company ewo, based in Cortaccia, to Thun of Bolzano, the Hotel Bauer in Venice, Fondazione Haydn with the event Bolzano Danza-Tanz Bozen) - Museion has also presented its exhibitions and collection in very special locations. In addition to loans to museums as well as national and international institutions, Museion’s works have also been presented in shows in institutions abroad such as the “Embassy Goes Contemporary” event in the Italian Embassy in Berlin (2012).

From 17 December 2012 to 28 April 2013, works by more than 20 Italian artists from the Museion Collection were exposed in the historic reception halls of the Italian Embassy in Berlin, with videos, painted installations and photography.The exhibition was part of a broader programme to promote Italian art supported by the Italian Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin, and is a natural progression from the exhibition series ITaliens, which aimed to promote the work of Italian artists living in the German capital. To continue with this successful initiative the Foreign Service has decided to invite a number of Italian institutions to present part of their collections: Museion of Bolzano was the first to exhibit in the prestigious venue on the Tiergarten, presenting a selection of young artists from the collection curated by the Director of the museum, Letizia Ragaglia.

The partnership between Museion and the company ewo, based in the town of Cortaccia, saw light art from the Museion collection being displayed in the company's foyer, exploring different approaches to and reflections on the theme of light.

Since 2014, Museion and the Bolzano Danza-Tanz Bozen festival have been collaborating annually, resulting in consolidated evenings dedicated to Museion's media façade, enriching them with dance shows as well as video projections. During the first edition, the Michele Di Stefano's Roman dance company mk and the visual artist Luca Trevisani jointly presented four different, site-specific scenarios, both inside and outside Museion, taken from the project "Friday> Robinson". The video was subsequently incorporated into the Museion collection.

Women artists frequently go beyond social conventions in order to analyse them, creating a mental space in which viewers can, and indeed must, form their own perception. In recent years Museion has devoted solo shows to numerous female artists whose work sets out to subvert conventional frameworks, from VALIE EXPORT to Teresa Margolles, Monica Bonvicini, Rosemarie Trockel, Isa Genzken, Rossella Biscotti and Lili Reynaud-Dewar.

By including specific acquisitions subsequent to solo exhibitions in the museum, in its collection Museion has always sought to achieve a balance between international artists and local ones, and the museum's project room is devoted to the work of young local artists (such as Vera Comploj, Nicolò DeGiorgis, Gabriela Oberkofler, Sven Sachsalber and Martino Gamper).

Museion has always paid special attention to Italian art. Recent shows have included solo exhibitions by artists from younger generations, like Monica Bonvicini, Micol Assaël, Nico Vascellari, Rossella Biscotti, Diego Perrone, Rä di Martino and Francesco Vezzoli. One specific area of research is the Italian art in the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura collection, and Museion has produced shows devoted to leading figures like Maurizio Nannucci and Nanni Balestrini.

The Language in Art section encloses artworks that belong to trends that are very different one from the other, in which written language plays a specific role. Language in Art introduces an aspect of hybrid forms between art and writing, between image and text, between the drawn line and writing, it constitutes a representative manifestation of modern and contemporary art. The nucleus includes also narrative and political art forms or artworks that work with advertising principles. An important role is given by visual and concrete poetry, as much as by artworks of the Fluxus Movement, part of Museion’s collection thanks to the long term loan of the collection "Archivio di Nuova Scrittura".

The goal of the VVV project, which was conceived as a collaboration between the three institutions Mart in Rovereto, Museion in Bolzano and the Digital Humanities research group of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, was the implementation of an online platform that allows users to discover and study the verbo-visual artworks that constitute the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura (ANS) of collector Paolo Della Grazia, which is physically archived at both Mart and Museion. For select artists of the collection, the VVV online portal features an advanced search that enriches the data with additional documentary and bibliographical information. Based on that data, an interactive visualization format was developed, which, using a "network" visualization model, allows the general public to explore the data through novel and unique pathways to virtually access the collection. In doing so, the VVV platform specifically highlights educational and exposition-related pathways. This scientific approach, combined with the novel data visualization techniques provided by the Digital Humanities team, greatly enhances the experience of verbo-visual researches. In addition, the game "Playful Art: A Game On Similarity", based on the degree of similarities between the visual perceptions of its participants, is the winner of the "Digital Humanities Award 2015" in the category "Best use of DH for fun". www.verbovisualevirtuale.org  

The nucleus of works that bring together the worlds of images and text occupies a large area of Museion, and the new building features a specially-designed permanent structure to host it. The shelves in the museum’s exhibition space proved the ideal setting for displaying the “Studiensammlung”, which literally translates as “studio collection”.