COLLECTING FOR TOMORROW

The exhibition presents works that have joined Museion’s collection in the last years, as acquisitions, donations or long-term loans. They all tie in with the research themes pursued by the museum, such as the new directions in sculpture, and the exhibition brings to light the fact that traditional artistic categories no longer always exist separately from one another.

Nanni Balestrini, poet, artist and writer, has had a profound influence on the development of Italian art and literature over the last 50 years. An attentive observer of the social situation, he creates novels, artist books and a multitude of visual poems. In these poems, newspaper clippings (images, letters and text) have been applied to a white background: new, unexpected meanings spring from these fragmented combinations that reflect the political and cultural climate of an era. These works, which are viewed as seminal pieces of the visual poetry genre, also reveal a central practice in Balestrini's oeuvre: collage.

ARBEIT MACHT KAPITAL (“Work produces capital” or “Work Power Capital”) is written in “K font” using fluorescent tubes. The name of this font pays homage to Franz Kafka and his character K, the protagonist of the unfinished novel The Castle (1926). This version of the work is a mockup of the original, sized according to the neon tubes used. The three words in the neon sign can be interpreted in different ways, depending on whether they are read singly, together, or as a sentence. The phrase, ARBEIT MACHT KAPITAL, which on one hand evokes the spectre of the concentration camps, comprises terms which are also in recurrent use in modern democracies.

Philippe Parreno works with a variety of different media: with film, sculpture, performance, drawing, text, and with the exhibition itself as a medium. Marquee is one of a group of works resembling a projecting roof with lights like those sometimes found above entryways. This form of sculpture is integrated into real architecture, where it marks the transition into a fundamentally different perceptual space. There are also ironic connotations here of the glamourous sheen enjoyed by certain ideas about art.

M’illumino d’immenso: the words of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s famous poem of 1917 have been translated into rhythm and light. The seven movements of the green laser reflect the phonetics of the text, namely the linguistic sounds created when the poem is read out loud. The vertical line rises in four movements then contracts before expanding horizontally in three echoing motions. The precise clarity of the green beam of light created by the laser is a physical representation of Ungaretti’s stark brevity.

The video draws on the imagery of Western films to tackle the issue of territory in geographical, cultural, and physical terms. The camera slowly pans over a landscape reminiscent of Western movies, until it encounters an all-female orchestra playing the famous soundtrack composed by Elmer Bernstein for the film The Magnificent Seven (1960) by John Sturges. The landscape in question is actually war-torn Georgia, on the dividing line between Europe and Asia, and the artist reveals the paradox: although geographically situated well to the east of the legendary Wild West, Georgia is often used as a location for this kind of film – all men, horses, and new frontiers to conquer.

Tea 1391, commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13), is a documentary film that is part of the artist’s project on the One Hotel in Kabul (Afghanistan), where the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti lived and worked from 1971 to 1977. Thirty years after Boetti left the One Hotel, and after the historical events that occurred in Afghanistan, Garcia Torres returned to the hotel in 2010. The video is about this experience, about what had changed in the meantime, and about how the artist, many years later, found himself in the dual role of both guest and host.

The title of the video references the work of Aimé Fernand David Césaire Un homme qui crie n’est pas un ours qui danse (1939). In the video, landscapes of the Mississippi Delta alternate with shots of the inside of a house in New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina (2005). The silence of the sleepy river and sinister house interior is broken by the deafening rhythm of drumsticks beating on window blinds, and the noise and flashes of light this creates gives the whole video a feeling of urgency. A tribute to New Orleans, the video reflects on the natural disaster and its human and economic fallout.

An Embroidered Trilogy is a project by Francesco Vezzoli consisting of three videos that were produced between 1997 and 1999, in which the artist cast himself as the inert embroiderer who remains indifferent to the emotive melodramas performed around him by famous divas. As Francesco Vezzoli told himself: "If I must find a definition for myself, I’d like to be a director-embroiderer. Furthermore, everything has already been done in the history of cinema, and embroidery serves to pull together the threads of what has already been done, to tie together different images and personalities and given them a new form."

Cagol tackles sociopolitical issues, leaving each viewer free to make his or her own interpretation of the work based on personal experiences. The video explores the ambiguities, dualities, and dark side of our daily lives, taking a very simple, direct approach. The video focuses on the contrast between a landscape of ice and snow versus elements such as air, fire, light, and water. The artist ventured beyond the Arctic Circle to Kirkenes in the Barents region of Norway, which shares a border with Finland and Russia. Here, the artist created a series of actions exploring the notion of border.

Shifting between drawing, sculpture and photography, Roni Horn has always explored the themes of identity and difference, and the ungraspable nature of things and events. These themes focus on humankind and its inevitable state of being “in the making”, as well as on the way places change. The series of photographs taken in Iceland, where the artist has chosen to live, is a good example of the latter. Roni Horn considers Iceland a verb and not an object, on account of the incessant changes its landscapes are subject to: never finished and always in the making.

Vera Comploj combines her work as a fashion photographer with a personal study of issues related to identity, genetics, and physical changes. In her projects she engages with photographic work of the late 1970s and the 1980s by artists that explored the representation of the body and gender issues. The photograph here come from a series entitled In Between. Comploj started working on this project in 2009, soon after arriving in New York. The photographs take us into the world of America’s drag queens, captured during the transition from man to woman, day to night, ordinary life to stage.

From the Forbidden Zone was created for the exhibition "New Entries", which was on display at Museion between 2009 and 2010. Young artists were invited to deal with the collection of the museum. Michael Fliri chose a work from American artist Eleanor Antin, who had occupied herself with the transformation phenomenon during the 1970s. Subsequently, Fliri conceived a performance, in the course of which he disguised himself as an ape-like creature. The depicted photograph originates from that performance.

From Here to There is a video installation shot by a Jack Russell Terrier called Stanley. Jana Sterbak edits the images filmed by the camera attached to the dog’s head as it frolics in the snow and rustles through the undergrowth along the banks of the river St. Lawrence in Montreal and the “Calli” in Venice. The viewer has to rely on Stanley’s natural curiosity to get a look at these locations, and in the six excerpts the human eye merges with that of the animal. Jana Sterbak’s work explores issues regarding human perception and the relationships between man and the animal kingdom, nature and technology.

Dischi di Dei is an installation of 93 record albums hanging from the ceiling by nylon threads, together with 93 album covers tacked up in a line on the wall. The albums deliberately represent a cross-section of wide-ranging music genres, although the artist also took their covers into consideration in making his selection. With a fine drill bit, Arienti traced the outlines of the images on the album covers hole for hole onto the album inside, so that the albums became like duplications or variations on the cover images.

The installation is a clear reference to the Second World War period. The voice we can hear in the room is that of the artist, saying “Come my little Neapolitans [...] sway, sway”. The work refers to the period in which the allied forces came to Naples, and the music is the dance-hall genre that was popular at the time. The swing that the onlooker is invited to sit on evokes a sort of oscillation from one side to the other of the space, which is half red and half blue, referencing the American flag. It is a “physical memory”, a tangible reminiscence of the Americans arriving in Naples in ’43. Just as the soldiers brought their music and culture, so the artist Vito Acconci, invited to the Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1977, brought American art to Italy. Outside the room visitors will see records of the first presentation of the work.

Jukebox II consists of a console, 3 CD changers holding 192 CDs, an amplifier, and four speakers. Starting with the prime meridian in Greenwich, the artist divided the circumference of the earth into eight segments of 45° each. The eight lines of longitude pass through a number of seaside towns and villages in Brazil, New Orleans, Alaska, Fiji, Japan, Bangladesh and Yemen. Dean had sound recordings made in each of these places starting punctually at noon on the last day of the year 1999 and lasting for 24 hours. Exhibition visitors can choose from 192 CDS available in the jukebox, each of which contains 60 audio clips of outdoor noises recorded in parallel in the eight different regions of the world. The sound of the selected place can be combined with a specific time of day, giving the user listening to these heterogeneous space-time pieces diverse impressions that interrupt the homogeneity and linear progression of his own experience of time. Jukebox II can be thought of as a temporal sound kaleidoscope.

Klara Lidén creates architectural interventions and installations that exploit existing structures and materials such as cardboard, posters, sheet metal, drywall, and carpet scraps. With the rebellious spirit of an activist, the artist rethinks the places we traverse and inhabit, applying a very physical approach: here, for example, sculptures made of bits of tarmac created an unusual, eerie landscape which forged a relationship between the internal and external dimensions, forcing visitors to rethink and reappropriate public space in a new way.

Vlad Nanca sees his works as a response to the changes wrought in Romanian society by the anti-Communist revolution of 1989. The photo series Commemora, which consists of four photographs and a scarf, uses the metaphor of knitting, which involves the interweaving of different threads, to allude to the missing links and the inequalities within the social fabric. Nanca challenges viewers to come to terms with unrelated stories and reminiscences, uncertain pasts and future expectations, in order to weave them into a single common thread.

Teresa Margolles’s works examine the causes and consequences of death in her native area, near the city of Juárez in Mexico, which is plagued with drug-related crime, poverty, and political crises. This project involved performances in Bolzano and Kassel, where the show was presented, and in Juárez itself. The performers wore black T-shirts printed with “How much can a city take?” and “How much pain can a city stand?” in three languages. The provocative questions on the T-shirts were the message that the artist wanted taken around the cities by her collaborators, as she calls those who take part in her actions, given that they become an integral part of her statement. The three cities in question have had very different experiences of violence and suffering, but nonetheless, these elements are something they all have in common.

Aui Oi, which means “up and down” in South Tyrolean German dialect. Designed for the Renon cable car in Bolzano and presented at the Transart Festival, it won first prize. The visitors experienced an auditory journey in the cable car cabins. The sound was produced locally and transferred via a webstream into the cabins so it could be experienced by the passengers. An adaptation of the audio piece was created for Museion and set up inside the lif ts that take visitors up and down to the various floors, thus changing the way these functional spaces were experienced by users.

In The King of Solana Beach, Antin experimented with another persona, constructing an idealized version of herself as a man. With a fake beard, velvet cape, lace shirt, leather boots and a floppy hat, Eleanor Antin wandered round a small town north of San Diego conversing with some of its inhabitants – pensioners, students and sporty types – who before the fateful encounter with her were entirely unaware they were living in a tiny kingdom, governed by this diminutive figure. Antin’s performance was recorded in a series of eight black and white photographs and a text.

The artist book consists of a total of twenty sheets - 10 by Andre and 10 by Mendieta. On each sheet, Andre has drawn 12 squares in the same arrangement: the consistent use here of the motif of stones (“Pietre”) on the different sheets only displays slight differences from the manual version. The 10 sheets by Mendieta (“Foglie”), which alternate with those of Andre, each feature 3 to 6 tree leaves in symmetrical arrangements. What emerges in this artist’s book is a dialogue between an illustrative aesthetic (Andre) and a photographic aesthetic (Mendieta), between inorganic and organic material, between geometric and non-geometric arrangement. In this artist’s book created jointly with Ana Mendieta, Carl Andre’s minimalist aesthetic enters into a dialogue with his partner’s fundamentally strongly existential artistic approach.

In 1973–74, Nannucci led a photographic investigation of the various shades of green that occur in nature. The portfolio and the corresponding artist’s book from 1977, in which sixty photos of sixty different plants on seven pages are pictured, is one of the most influential and therefore most frequently exhibited artists’ books of those years. Every photo has a name attributed to it describing a specific shade of green, from “verde galactites tomentosa” to “verde ophiopogon jaburan” and from “verde sedum compressum” to “verde matthiola incana” and “verde vitis vinifera.”

For the project Hotel Cubo the Little Museion – Museion’s outlying venue in the Don Bosco neighbourhood – was transformed into a genuine miniature hotel. Until June 2014 visitors could spend a night in this very special accommodation. The “package” on offer includes an audio guide to explore the Don Bosco neighbourhood the morning after spending a night there. Egger’s invite is clear: this is an opportunity to take a fresh look at an area of Bolzano that many are unfamiliar with, yet that is packed with history and life.

Paolo Riolzi, in his project “Vetrinette” aimed to create a photographic world of our collective identity via old-fashioned display cabinets, bearing the best china, photographs, souvenirs and memories of a lifetime.The project travelled through various cities before reaching Bolzano. On exhibition were 1:1 scale photographs of the six display cabinets that were involved in this multi-phase project. Previously the cabinets had been on display, as part of the project, in the Little Museion Cubo Garutti in the Don Bosco area of the city.

The “Camera Cubica” project came about with the idea of reviving the ancient, all but forgotten technique of pinhole photography. Degiorgis employed the very structure of the Cubo Garutti venue as a photographic device: a camera obscura situated in a public area. For a number of weeks, the artist invited local people to take pictures using the Cube/camera and take part in this magical process. The resulting images portray the neighbourhood, its architecture, the urban scenario and its inhabitants.