LA CONSERVAZIONE DELLA LIBERTÀ
Curated by Pietro Gaglianò
20.09 – 02.11.2019
Fondazione Berengo – Palazzo Franchetti, Venice
The RADICAL project, conceived by Penzo+Fiore for Fondazione Berengo, continues with an exhibition that observes the way in which history is reflected in subjective perception and opens up through the experience of art. Memory, power and freedom are the key terms of La conservazione della libertà (The Preservation of Freedom), with the works of Elena El Asmar and Loredana Longo curated by Pietro Gaglianò.
The project was born from several years of attention the curator dedicated to the aesthetics of power and to the counter-acts made, or simply made possible, by the work of art. Art, when manifested as an unauthorized divergent representation, not complementary to the dynamics of control, constitutes a critical point that opposes the homogenisation of thought and the automations of mass culture.
The time of art, that flows through and animates the work of Elena El Asmar and Loredana Longo, is present time by necessity, because it involves the observer in a here and now that does not admit misunderstandings or delays. It gathers the past with the future and focuses on freedom as presence and as a critical gaze, bringing the individual back to his inevitable relationship with the human condition.
The two protagonists of the show are holders of independent research and express themselves with different mediums and formats, aiming at a different position of their works with respect to the space of vision and the relationship with the public. What unites them is a sensitivity to memory that leads them to work on the deconstruction of historical time and its arbitrariness; their works connect places and eras, the appearace of minute things that reveal a broader and, at times, secret dimension. In this weaving, sometimes patient sometimes violent, linear time – that of official narratives – expands and branches out to indicate unspoken connections and opens the possibility to other readings.
The exhibition is thus composed as a journey around the Mediterranean, an inescapable center for the history of several continents, in which the evocations of a mystified Middle East, in the work of Elena El Asmar, stand alongside the representations of a state of war that unites the twentieth century with our current times, in that of Loredana Longo. The works exhibited are linked to each other, between myth and historiography, desire for knowledge and unmasking of propaganda, old and new colonialisms: a work of laceration and of care, for the preservation of freedom.
Fondazione Berengo
San Marco 2847
30124 Venezia - Italy
+39 041.739453
comunicazione@berengo.com
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