The Indonesian magazine I Magazine Bali has just published my review of the Bali Bulè exhibition at Museo Archeologico in Naples, featuring artists Bickerton, Ontani and Sciascia.
Here the link to the magazine website
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Coming back from Australia, I decided to see the Venice Biennale before it ends.
Maybe it was not the greatest Biennale ever, but there are some artworks worth talking about. Here you are, my personal list of favourites:
- Arthur Bispo do Rosario
I didn’t know about this incredible Brazilian artist before. Apparently he spent fifty years confined to the attic of a psychiatric institution because he started telling people about his visions. In the institution he started making art not with the idea of becoming an artist, but for his own eternal salvation. His work was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and now he is exhibiting again at the Arsenal.
I have always been attracted by work that relates with paganism, religion and folk tradition. His clusters of waste material, paper, wood and rags are just beautiful. His installations look like toys or fetishes.
Bindi Cole is one of the first artists I interviewed in Melbourne.
I come to know about her work during the presentation talk of “Melbourne Now” exhibition at the NGV.
Her work span through different mediums, from photography to installation, and the themes are often related to her personal history and aboriginal issues.
She constantly challenges stereotypes, revealing overlooked complexities behind communities and identities. In the series “Not Really Aboriginal” she photographed her family and herself with black painting on their face. The title refers to the accusation that some people addressed to her, that of not being “really” Aboriginal, because of her anglosaxon aspect and her light skin.
One of her most challenging work is “Sistagirls”, a photographic series about the transgender community of the Tiwi Islands.
Recently Bindi Cole decided to reflect on her personal history, mainly through video and installations. Even if she went through tough times, her vision underlies a constant optimism and reveals the beauty of the human experience.
I find her recent installation with emu feathers “I Forgive You) (currently exhibited at Queensland Art Gallery) just moving.
We have seen plenty of celebrations of the sea. The only subject that is as hackneyed as the sea is the sky. And love.
But really, to be innovative is not to talk about a new subject for the first time. To be innovative is to be able of talking about a corny subject in a new, or personal or moving way.
If you are a musician, go ask Ivano Fossati about it. If you are a painter, ask Piero Guccione. If you are a photographer, do what Monitor Gallery did. Go ask Antonio Rovaldi.
In Melbourne one of the first questions people ask you is “where do you come from?”.
It makes sense in a city where hostels are flooding with drunk people swearing in so many different languages.
There are backpackers coming here with a sheer party mentality, europeans seeking for a well-payed job as waiters and wannabe adventures romantically compelled by soil their hair with red dust, possibly riding through the desert on a rusty jeep (that’s me, and I sadly found out that there is not that much desert in Victoria).
The prosaic reality of Melbourne city clashed so hard with my fantasy – eating Kangaroo on a red rock with aboriginals people – that I decided to keep myself busy with what is supposed to be my main job: contemporary art.
Well, the truth was that I was already in Melbourne to complete the last stages of my reportage about Indonesian contemporary art, so I found myself turning on the recorder and listen to the artist Tintin Wulia.
It was the first interview here in Melbourne and one of the last interviews for my reportage about Indonesia Contemporary Art.
Her work and her experience as an artist epitomized the core of my book: there is no such a thing called Indonesian art, there are some practices born in a geographical segment called Indonesia, and there are some artists born in Indonesia that are making art.
The edges are so sharp just on the map – ideas and aesthetic are much more fluid – yet these borders matter incredibly when comes to bureaucracy, biennales pavilions and personal identity.
When you visit a museum in Australia, you have to consider the snake danger.
According to the Australian mentality, which is close to Hinduism in this sense, you shouldn’t kill any snake – after all a snake is still part of the wildlife and you have to respect it.
Anyways, being aware of the snake danger, I decided to go to the Heide Museum equipped with my Crocodile Dundee hat.
I hoped that my Indonesian boyfriend Lucas would have bring with him a kris and my Japanese friend Minako a katana but, alas, they didn’t.
“What about you? Didn’t you bring a mandolino with you?” Lucas asked me referring to my Neapolitan origins.
“How you supposed to kill a snake with a mandolino, genius?”
“Unless…” I mumbled making my way through the lianas separating us from the museum “you charm the snake playing Torna a Surriento or something like that.”
Walking carefully, we finally arrived at the door of the Heide Museum without being bitten, which was good.
The current show was titled “Fiona Hall: Big game hunting”
Coming into the exhibition I took off my hat and I rapidly switched my attitude from adventurer to art critic.
In one of his poems Baudelaire said that there is no beauty without a little bit of sadness.
This artwork, from my personal collection of contemporary art, is both beautiful and painful to me.
Lucas Leo Catalano realized it for the first exhibition of the art/poetry collective Poetry Experience in which I partecipate as well.
This work has been exhibited in The Room Gallery in Rome and at Museo del Viaggio in Positano.
The international magazine Women in the City just published my interview with the Taiwanese artist and busker Lin Bee Dwo. The interview is part of my research about the Melbourne art scene.
Here you are the link to the interview
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Within few months I’ve appreciated two artworks that look similar but that are very different in the concept.
The first one is at MACRO Testaccio, Rome, Italy and it’s called Big Bambù, by the American artists Mike e Doug Starn.
The second is site-specific installation covering the pavillion of ART/JOG12, Yogyakarta, Indonesia and it’s by the Indonesian artist Joko Dwi Avianto.
Enjoy the photogallery:
It’s been two years since my collaboration with Art a Part of cult(ure) began. My first article was about the japanese artist Masachi Echigo, you can read it here.
I’ve met Art a Part director Barbara Martusciello in a gallery in Piazza di Spagna, she was doing an interesting series of lectures about contemporary art.
At that time I already wrote for the magazine Arskey and the webmagazine Teknemedia, but I wasn’t very happy with them because they give me sort of limitations of style and criticize the artists was totally forbidden.
