PERFORMING PAC. MADE of SOUND
02.07 - 13.09.2020
mostra performing 4 mostra mobile performing 4

PERFORMING PAC, the annual event devoted to a topical theme in the field of contemporary visual art studies, comes back with an extended version. This third edition, presented under the titled MADE of SOUND, develops the theme of the relationship between art and music, which will be expanded on through video works, archive material and contributions by artists, critics and curators who will explorer the interaction between sound and image in practice and in contemporary artistic research.

 

We ideally start with Laurie Anderson, icon of multimedia art, reconstructing through archival materials her anthological exhibition at PAC in 2003 The Record of the Time, curated by Jean Hubert Martin and Thierry Raspail, and projecting for the first time the video documentation of the action Duets On Ice performed by the artist during the opening.

 

The exhibition itinerary unfolds through the works of 5 artists who use sound and music in their artistic practice:

Barbara and Ale, The sky is falling, 2017

Jeremy Deller con Nick Abrahams, Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode, 2006

Pamela Diamante, GENERARE CORPI CELESTI - ESERCIZI DI STILE, 2020 (musica Marco Malasomma) e Note, 2017

Invernomuto, Vers l'Europa deserta, Terra Incognita, 2017

João Onofre, Untitled (N'en Finit Plus), 2010-11

INFO AND OPENING TIMES
Tuesday to Sunday 9:30 am to 7:30 pm
Thursday 9:30-22:30
Closed Monday
Last entry one hour before closing
Photo Gallery
200616_CoverGuidaDigitale

PERFORMING PAC MADE of SOUND

PERFORMING PAC, the annual event devoted to a topical theme in the field of contemporary visual art studies, comes back with an extended version. This third edition, presented under the titled MADE of SOUND, develops the theme of the relationship between art and music, which will be expanded on through video works, archive material and contributions by artists, critics and curators who will explorer the interaction between sound and image in practice and in contemporary artistic research.

Room 1 LAURIE ANDERSON

THE RECORD OF THE TIME

From the 11th of November 2003 to the 15th of February 2004, PAC exhibited The Record of Time, the first anthological show dedicated to Laurie Anderson, curated by Jean Hubert Martin and Thierry Raspail. The exhibition featured ninety works retracing the career of the New York artist from the early seventies to the early 2000s. Story-teller even before visual artist and musician, Laurie Anderson describes, in the catalogue and in the apparatuses for the audience, an imaginary made of voice, sound, words, spaces and “alter ego”.

Laurie Anderson, installation view of The Record of The Time, PAC 2003

DUETS ON ICE

For the first time PAC shows the video documentation of the Duets on Ice performance, originally presented by the artist in New York and in Genoa in 1975, which Laurie Anderson created on the occasion of PAC inauguration. The video made in 2003 during the inauguration is presented on two channels. The first documents the performance all along its duration, while the other is a story of the exhibition and of the works “activated” by the public.

“While playing the violin, a loudspeaker placed inside reproduced a prerecorded violin piece, a loop song that had neither beginning nor end. But I needed a device to define the time, to express the duration. So I put on a pair of skates with the blades immobilized by blocks of ice: when the ice melted and I lost my balance, the concert ended. In Genoa, during the concert, I took a short break to address the audience who was listening to me and explain in my strained Italian that I played those songs in memory of my grandmother. I said that on the day of her death I had gone for a walk on a frozen lake. There were many wild ducks that fluttered and flapped their wings. I had come very close to them, yet they did not fly away. Then I discovered that they couldn’t move because their legs were blocked by a layer of ice.”

Room 2 INVERNOMUTO

VERS L’EUROPA DESERTA, TERRA INCOGNITA

Vers l’Europa deserta, Terra Incognita aims at a deconstruction of the models of inventive self-representation in between mise-en-scene and documentation   Employing videoclips, Instagram stories and Snapchat streams as primary media to disseminate complex selfportrayals.

Starring Bené and Macha Django, two young actors from PNL’s crew (PNL is a music duo from the Paris banlieu Tarterêts) featured in the duo’s micro-films, the video shows the couple traversing landmarks of Parisian culture such as the Theatre du Châtelet and the Salle des fêtes of the Hôtel de Ville; this abstract account is abruptly interrupted by shots of the two in Le Vele – infamous social housing project in Napoli – at the same time glitch and glue to the narration. In 2015 PNL released Le monde ou rien, their most successful song to date, whose videoclip was shot in Le Vele; the following year, the song’s refrain was used as a rallying cry and tagline by young protesters in the labor reform riots that struck Paris.

The protagonists seem to be trapped in a loop where self-representation has been substituted by a perpetual pose for an absent audience, a now deserted Europe acting as stage and backdrop. A main loop repeats itself with slight variations, so as to make a ritournelle emerge. It is the task of the soundtrack, commissioned to two musicians (Robert Girardin and Lorenzo Senni) to break free of this repetition and at the same time highlight it, suggesting different moods for as much versions of the video.

Invernomuto, Vers l'Europa deserta, Terra Incognita, 2017
Video still. Courtesy the artists and Pinksummer, Genova

BIO

Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi have been collaborating as INVERNOMUTO since 2003. Although their work focuses primarily on the moving image and sound, they also integrate sculpture, performance and publishing into their practice.  Their works has been shown at TATE, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; MAXXI, Rome; Museion, Bozen; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. In 2017 Invernomuto wins the Museion Prize 1, Bozen and in 2018 they are finalists of the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize, Rome and MAC International 2018, Belfast.

Room 3 BARBARA AND ALE

THE SKY IS FALLING

Swiss Alps: 2328 metres in altitude

-10°C. Wind, snow, clouds and sun.
A laid down vibraphone on a frozen lake.

 

Title and setting: it did not say anything else to Elio Marchesini to invite him to be protagonist of the film. An imaginary motorway through the mountains where the wind runs, which breaks the ice, which draws the snow-clad landscape and where the metal’s vibration converses, disappears and resists the continuous gusts.

The whiteout is a visual dysfunction caused by whiteness of snow and clouds that confuses violently: the sky is falling. All that remains is a lonely person, missing in the landscape, who plays a vibraphone and insists on don’t lose control.

BIO

Barbara Ceriani Basilico (b. 1979 in Saronno) and Alessandro Mancassola (b. 1979 in Arzignano) began working together in 2005. Among others, they exhibited their videos at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Pac, Milan; Rauma Art Museum, Finland; Merz Foundation, Turin; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Foundation, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice; the National Art Gallery, Tirana. Barbara leads creative/experiential workshops and Alessandro teaches videos in the Brera, G. Carrara and Santagiulia Academies.

Room 4 JEREMY DELLER WITH NICK ABRAHAMS

OUR HOBBY IS DEPECHE MODE

Jeremy Deller and Nick Abraham’s 2006 documentary, Our Hobby is Depeche Mode tells a story of resolute faith and devoted fandom; a bizarre, funny, sad and often touching reflection on how people intimately embrace and appropriate pop culture in their own lives.

Originally commissioned as part of a planned anniversary release by Depeche Mode’s label, Mute Records, Deller and Abraham’s film exclusively follows the band’s ardent and hardcore international fanbase, documenting their enthusiasms, rituals, and passionate partisanship.

Abrahams travelled to Mexico, the US, Germany, Romania, Brazil and Canada to meet and film fans of the synth band, exploring the deep connection that they have with the group. The film introduces individuals like Mark who’s love for the Depeche Mode helped him cope with a period of homelessness in London; Orlando in Los Angeles who maintains a candlelight shrine to the band as well as the thousands of youngsters who gather every year in Moscow on May 9th to celebrate ‘Dave Day’ – appropriating the national ‘Victory Day’ holiday that coincides with the band’s frontman, Dave Gahan’s birthday.

BIO

Jeremy Deller (b. London, 1966) studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 for his work ‘Memory Bucket’ and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He has been producing projects over the past two decades which have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside conventional galleries. Deller has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions in the most important museums and international art events including The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Skulptur Projekte, Münster; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; New Museum, New York.

Room 5 JOÃO ONOFRE

UNTITLED (N’EN FINIT PLUS)

Untitled  (n’en  finit  plus) examines the appropriation is a theme declined in very different ways both in the art practice and in Pop music, and the possibility that these two parallel worlds would overlap.

The  video features  a performance  at  night  of  a  teenager  sings ʼLa nuit nʼen finit plusʼ by Petula  Clark standing  alone  inside  an enormous hole digged on purpose in a vast flat lawn in a natural park. The girl,  while  the  camera  is  continuously  filming  suggesting  with  its  movement  a  virtual  circularity:  first  a close up of the blackened dirt on the ground, to focus then on the teenager while slowly turning away from her toreach the night sky and loop back to the dark soil.

Recorded  in 1970, the song by Petula Clark is a  cover  of  ʻNeedles  and  Pinsʼ, a  tune originally  played  by  Jackie  DeShannon. In Clarck’s song the desired object is not gendered: in this version it may  well not be a person that is being desired but  another  thing  or  place,  an  undetermined  context.

By  choosing  a  young  girl  to  sing  Clarkʼs  lyrics,  Onofre  deliberately  avoids  the  extreme  subjectivity of Petula Clarkʼs interpretation in order to reveal instead the distance between the ʻvoiceʼ that is singing and the meaning of the words of the song, which may go beyond a full understanding for the still immature personality of a young girl, not yet capable of expressing herself like an adult.The images from the video – in this as in previous works from the artist – add further narrative associations to the performative act of interpreting the lyrics of a song, delineating unexpected perspectives.

BIO

João Onofre (b. 1976 in Lisbon) he studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and concluded his MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in London in 1999.
His work, largely devoted to the making of videos or video installations, stages situations close to the absurd, which test the limits of the subjects called upon as well as those of the spectator with actions and performances. Onofre took part in numerous international group exhibitions, amongst them: The 49th Venice Biennale; Performing Bodies, Tate Modern, London. His work is represented in public and private collections worldwide such as: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Weltkunst Foundation, Zurich.

Gallery / Balcony PAMELA DIAMANTE

GENERARE CORPI CELESTI – ESERCIZI DI STILE

The advertising of the future aims to use the sky as an immense billboard: by sending an orbital display into the atmosphere, we will be able to see the Amazon or Just Eat logos as if they were the likeness of ancient stars.

The project reflects the image of anthropocentric mankind, a creator capable of carrying out almost any deed, even that of creating celestial bodies but who, in actualising his desire for power, must necessarily destroy, and our fate in this dystopic future will be to become blind in the face of the infinite.

The voice of Paolo, a blind man, recounts the emotion of the recollection of being able to see the stars; the artist – in collaboration with the composer Malasomma – has broken down his words, which have been dubbed into various languages, and translated them into music. Antonio who, on the other hand, has been blind since birth, has depicted on two large canvases something he has never been able to see: a starry sky.

NOTES

The compression of red soil that characterizes the thread of the Apricena stone is attributable to the geological eras of the late Miocene – the first Pliocene, the period in which the first lands emerged from marine waters and the first life forms began to populate the land. Continuing, species after species, with the succession of life and death, they have left a testimony of their passage now preserved in the sedimentation of the stone.

The linearly nervous shape of the sedimentation of the red thread was drawn in a graphite with a frequency-intensity graph, which reports the frequency in Hertz and intensity expressed in decibels.

The sign just pronounced and the use of the graphite on stone leads to a minimal grammar, where it is not the matter which is required to assume new forms to create object representations, but it is the user who has to change the point of view with which it observes the essence of all things.

Notes n. 3-6 and details, 2017
Graphite on apricena's stone, 50x30 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Gilda Lavia, Roma

BIO

Pamela Diamante (b. 1985 in Bari) she graduated in Sculpture from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bari in 2016, with a thesis on the connections between art, science and new technologies. Prior to that, she worked in the Italian army for five years, taking part in various humanitarian missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo. In 2019 she won the European Investment Bank’s Artists Development Programme, in 2017 she won the Italy-Argentina Art Award from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and in 2015 she was awarded the National Arts Award by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, including Concretespace, Miami; Kooshk, Tehran; BNL Media Art Festival at the MAXXI, Rome; Premio Maretti at the Centro de Desarollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana.

Parterre MARIE CÉRISIER

PILE À CD

Our individual and collective histories are also characterised by the musical tapestry that accompanies us throughout our everyday life. Starting from this impression, Marie Cérisier gives shape to her personal, imaginary memory, stacking her CDs – between “équilibre” and “déséquilibre” – in a sort of unstable stele that viewers are invited to dismantle piece by piece.

BIO

Marie Cérisier (b.1996 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin) she attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Nice. Her idea of the composition’s reduction to essential elements, carried out by means of installations based on narrative, symbolic and self-reflective processes, was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Cabanon, with which she has been obsessed since adolescence.

TRAILER

Barbara and Ale, The Sky is falling, 2017
Trailer. Courtesy the artists
Jeremy Deller with Nick Abrahams, Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, 2006
Teaser. Courtesy the artists and The Modern Institute, Glasgow
Pamela Diamante, GENERARE CORPI CELESTI - ESERCIZI DI STILE, 2020
Teaser. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Gilda Lavia, Roma
Invernomuto, Vers l'Europa deserta, Terra Incognita, 2017
Trailer. Courtesy the artists and Pinksummer, Genova
João Onofre, Untitled (N'en Finit Plus), 2010-11
Teaser. Courtesy the artist and Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbona

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