a project by Pier Luigi Tazzi Prato, from 19 October
Friday 19 October 18.00-21:00
Monash University Prato Centre, via Pugliesi 26, Prato
Lecturer: Pier Luigi Tazzi. Speakers: Kornkrit Jianpinidnan, Hanayo, Dollar Han, Jia Gao and Paolo Meoni.
Saturday 20 October 18:00-20:00
Hanayo, Dollar Han
MONDI is supported by Regione Toscana within the regional project "TOSCANAINCONTEMPORANEA2011"
The project consists in presenting the works of ten artists, the most of which coming from Asia and in their thirties and early forties, in the form of an illustrated conference run by the curator and with the participation of some of the selected artists, and of four exhibitions in galleries and other exhibition spaces in the city.
MONDI wants to show, discuss, and dig into that territory where photography, instead of a way to document the World, is an aperture on Worlds, where reflection gives up to openness and revealing.
Photography in its history and tradition has always entailed the assumption of an operational polarity: on one side the operating subject, the Roland Barthes' “operator”, on the other side the visible reality of the world, a world conceived in its monolithic and sole unity.
When the artists, starting from the 1970s and during the 1980s, free photography from its specificity and its history of a medium different from the others - painting, sculpture, drawing - and adopt it as an art tool of the same dignity of the others, old, or new such as performance, installation, film, video, and later on when digital photography is introduced and developed, photography becomes available to many and different expressive intents, and together they free it from the dichotomy that has marked it since its beginning: Subject vs World.
When the model of western art spreads on a planetary scale and at the same time comes into crisis, the new planetary artist finds available a rich set of tools that technology and culture have been tuning following that model: photography is among these tools.
So the minorities away from the centre of the - political, economic, social and cultural - empire, use this “friendly” medium, liberated from its history and traditional aesthetics, operator vs world, to open to those worlds – plural -, from whom each of these artists comes from and looks at.
It is about “worlds”. Worlds on the edges, peripheral, different but not in antagonism toward the sole and centralized World that artists from the centre go on looking at and working in by means of traditional methods.
Galleria Vault, via Genova 17/15, Prato; by appointment
On view until 6 December
http://www.spaziovault.com/index.php?lang=it&id=mostre&ref=20
