THE IMMIGRANTS
Experiment 2. Venice
Press preview: May 30th, 2013, 11am.
Opening to the public: May 30th, 2013, 6pm.
Closing: July 15th, 2013.
Address: Giudecca 800/r - 30133 Venice Italy.
Featured artists:
Alighiero Boetti
Igor Eškinja
Franklin Evans
Jacob Hashimoto
Radhika Khimji
Gianni Pettena
Luca Pozzi
Giovanni Rizzoli
Richard Prince
Santiago Sierra
Traslochi Emotivi
Very few words have the representative power and the semantic density of the word immigrant.
The artistic project The Immigrants, created by Federico Luger, takes this word as a point of departure,
it starts exactly in this universe of sense that in a few letters delimitates a territory—as a frontier—
and at the same time, it suggests a world-other, like a dream.
The title “The Immigrants” contains in a few words the invitation to a journey, to imagine a future,
the promise of an imagined or imaginary land, the occasion to leave behind the socio-political borders
and, may be, the invitation to wear a different mental habitus.
As every journey, also The Immigrants is a project-in-progress, moved by determination and cleverness
to search and build an alternative to already saturated spaces; or simply, the invitation to project
a future yet to be designed, without moving from one’s own environment, in a play of abandonment
and reconquest, of trust and dream.
In this experiment, a group show brings together artists belonging to different generations and nationalities
at the Giudecca island, a historic and popular neighbourhood in Venice, creating a sort of
terminal, an exchange station in which diverse experiences and visions intertwine, exactly as it happened
in harbours over the centuries.
The intention of this experiment is, in fact, to re-read the concepts of border, frontier and belonging.
It is not by chance that The Immigrants has as privileged frame the Giudecca Island and as hosting
space a former distillery, next to Mariano Fortuny’s historical workshop. Skimmed by the lagoon, the
Giudecca Island represents an exceptional observatory to have a kaleidoscopic gaze on the reality of
the journey, detached, analytic and dreamy at the same time.
Alighiero Boetti (Turin 1940-Rome 1994)
12 forme a partire dal 10 giugno 1967 is the fifi rst work which Boetti dedicates to geopolitics, driven
by the continuous news on war outbreaks reported by the newspapers: from the Battle of the Sinai
burst on 1967 between Egypt and Israel, to the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971. “I
have taken this or that cover from the newspaper “La Stampa” that reproduced this map, but I erased
all the rest –except from the date—and I engraved it on a copper plate. I had understood that each
time that a certain form appears on a newspaper cover [...] something important had occurred.” On
top, the date of publication was indicated. Deprived of any literal or illustrative character, the shapes
of the territories are transformed into pure “forms”, born not from the artist’s imagination, but from
the artillery attacks, air raids and diplomatic negotiations.
Igor Eškinja (Rijeka 1975)
his oeuvre goes beyond the mere political implications of the dematerialization of the artistic object,
conducting the viewer to the limit between “objective reality” and illusion.
This exhibition features two paradigmatic works from his production: Somewhere in East Europe
(2010) goes against the cliché according to which eastern Europe’s culture and artistic expressions
are sad and depressive. In this sense, Igor Eškinja uses every day reality and the history of art to
include with irony diverse cultivated citations. Whilst the work belonging to the series The Day After
(2011) is a re-interpretation of the sea realized with dust found in the place of the installation where
the photo was taken. In particular, Eškinja’s works, born from complex and ephemeral site-specifi c
installations, transmit the strength and vitality of art, which survives time and resists the mutability
of the human, social and political contexts.
Franklin Evans (Reno 1967)
expands his exploration of time and its non-linear repetition from his recent process-oriented installations.
The installation, composed of paintings and architectonical modulations realized with handpainted
tapes and trompe l’oeil walls as border, will include photographic representations that have
been determined by the documentation of his past installations. The frame connects to its representation
and borders on an object that is sculpture, photograph, painting, and architectural site. The
context of the Giudecca site informs his recombination of time, memory, and the visual, making evident
the constant, non-linear feedback among the parts of his installation. The repetition by means of
multiple materials forms an environment that hovers between actual and virtual.
Jacob Hashimoto (Greeley Colorado 1973)
uses ethereal materials to create artworks which, formed by different layers, compose an ensemble of
characteristic elements, both from painting and sculpture, thus bringing together bidimensionality and
tridimensionality. His works are abstract and colourful; however, they maintain some fi gurative elements
such as sea waves and clouds. The aesthetic dimension is not superfi cial, but is an intrinsic part
of Hashimoto’s oeuvre; and the overlapping of different and repeated units conforms at the same time
an impressive and subtle whole.
Radhika Khimji (Muscat 1979)
studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and the Royal Academy of Fine Art in London. Khimji’s work
questions postcolonial discourse, hierarchies in society and violence against women. The work is informed
primarily by a making process which leads to installations and drawings. The surfaces of her
work are platforms upon which she addresses her political and personal concerns, a complex ground
sometimes auto biographical and sometimes abstract. There is a certain melancholia for a historic
place, a search for a future place, where the shifts between the different temporalities of drawing,
sculpture and stitching create gaps and slippages to manifest a discontinuity between places and
things. Splices of memories and identities.
Gianni Pettena (Florence 1940)
has been a very active artist in the US during the Sixties and Seventies within the Land Art movement,
and in Italy within the movement Architettura Radicale. In this sense, his works using photography
as a medium are not those of a “photographer”, but more likely, those of the artist who uses
photography to take notes, as outlines that would later infl uence his research on landscape and architecture.
In this exhibition, eleven photographs from the series Wandering Through-USA 1971-73. The
Curious Mr. Pettena are featured. This series of photographs has been intentionally left as a notebook,
as artist’s sketches and not as fi nalized works; that is why they are “dirty”, there is no retouch, or
cleaning of the image. Using a Nikon F 50, which does not deform the subject in any way, Pettena’s
photographs later infl uenced several of his own projects. They have been conserved and shown in
the same condition in which gallerist Federico Luger found them by chance in the artist’s studio while
working together for his show at the gallery.
Luca Pozzi (Milan 1983)
presents a piece that is clue for his oeuvre, Wall String (2013). The Wall String is a pictorial system in
seven dimensions (SU7) composed by 49 aluminium folded bars. The polarity of each one of the bars
is remotely connected through the magnetic attraction of two coloured ping-pong balls.
In continuity with Pozzi’s research on physics, in particular on Quantum Gravity and T.o.E (Theory
of Everything: String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity and Noncommutative Geometry), the discrete
pattern that arises linking these 98 points suspended in the void represents a hypothetical gravitational
fi eld, as some of the contemporary quantum theories have suggested.
Richard Prince (Panama Canal Zone 1949)
The work featured in the exhibition, Untitled - Angie Dickinson (1985), is part of a series of photographs
in which the artist appropriated fi lm stills from Brian De Palma’s movies. Appropriation (or
re-photography) is a fundamental part of Prince’s oeuvre from the end of the eighties; from the
famous Marlboro cowboys to the objects of desire, such as watches or cars, taken from fashion
magazines that represented the American way of life of those years.
Giovanni Rizzoli (Venice 1963)
has researched all along his career on the possibilities of art through drawing, sculpture and painting,
as well as installations. He has developed a way of painting that he calls “painting with the
intravenous drip” that does not allow any choice beyond the moment of aperture and closing of the
switch and of the position of the needle, called “butterfl y needle”, on the fabric. The works featured
in this exhibition belong exclusively to this series because he fi nds this practice, which he started
twenty years ago, anthropologically topical: unlike the experiences of several artists of the Sixties,
it is the formal act that links the expression of a human condition to that one of the time of illness
and healing; the new possibility of developing a kind of painting that turns out to be symbolic, erotic,
but at the same time uncontrollable, and therefore, it is painting as answer, almost as divination.
Santiago Sierra (Madrid 1966)
is one of the best-known artists of the international artistic scene. He has shown his work in important
museums and institutions as MoMA PS1, New York; Reykjavik Art Museum; ARTIUM, Vitoria-
Gasteiz; Museo MADRE, Naples; 50° Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London. The works featured
in this exhibition are part of the series Pigs Devouring the Hellenic, Italic and Iberian Peninsulas.
These images are the result of a series of performances which begun in 2012 in Hamburg, where
the pigs had “devoured” the Hellenic Peninsula; then in Luca, the Italic Peninsula; and fi nally in Milan,
the Iberian Peninsula. Sierra is using a clear metaphor to denounce that the European fi nancial
entities are literally eating real territories.
Traslochi Emotivi (independent production house founded by Giulia Currŕ in 2010)
The video Kabul-Roma Roma -Kabul (2010) shows the friendship, and the artistic and professional
collaboration between Salmon Alě and Alighiero Boetti. Alě tells about the encounter with Boetti in
Kabul at the beginning of the seventies, and from 1975 on, invited by Boetti, of his move to Rome,
where he will work side by side with the artist for all his life, as a kind of alter ego. The video Kabul-
Roma Roma -Kabul has been shown at Spruth Magers London, Le Case d’Arte Milan and the Auditorium
Rai Torino.
This project has been realized in collaboration with:
Ghostart
Le Case d’Arte
prometeogallery di Ida Pisani
Studio La Cittŕ
Federico Luger Gallery.
