Marco Bolognesi with "Sendai city: the Truth" in Brazil at the Bienal de Curitiba 2017

On 30th September 2017 the artist #marcobolognesi is exhibiting "Sendai city: the Truth"in Brazil at the #bienaldecuritiba 2017, the largest #contemporaryart #event in Latin America, organised by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC), the State Government and the City of Curitiba.
Selected by the curator Massimo Scaringella, the artist will present a project that describes the relationship between truth and conflict at the prestigious headquarters of the Museu Oscar Niemeyer - MON, open until February 25th 2018.

• The Biennial 

The #bienaldecuritiba 2017 is entitled "Antipodes - Image Excess" and it aims to show that "Diversity" or "Opposites", this edition's topics for reflection, represent "not just a limit on artistic expression but also a limit between cultures. Limits that are never definite and represent crossroads that come and go, plural encounters and synergies created by different distinct, far and opposing points of view. According to Deleuze, transversality is a combination of differences"(Cit. Ticio Escobar) . 
The #bienaldecuritiba will host China as awarded country and will host artwork by artists from all five continents.   


Within the exhibit, Massimo Scaringella selected a diverse array ofartists to be included in his curatorial space. Besides #marcobolognesi, he provides a tribute to Davide Boriani (founder of the historical T group), the Finnish Tuomo Rosenlund & Johanna Pohjanvir  and Hannu Palosuo, the American Stevens Waughn, the Israeli Shay Frish and the Ivory Coast artist Joachim K. Silue, among others.

• “Sendai city: the Truth”

#marcobolognesi, the contemporary science fiction inspired artist who works at an international level, has designed an installation room for Curitiba, which will exhibit his "Techno Mutant" Photo Series (2017) for the first, talks about conflict in the contemporary world. 
Starting with the concept of truth - as per the title of the exhibition - Bolognesi deals with the obvious crisis that this word evokes: "Our culture - he observes - shows a glimpse of truth as the answer to the contemporary events of war, terrorism and especially the constant conflict between the West and the Middle East, which is not just a conflict between religions, but much more". According to the artist, in fact, present society is tied to the conflict in order to maintain control of reality, a reality that we perceive even if it does not exist. The truth, then, that at this point should justify the conflict, becomes just one point of view. 
Marco Bolognesi's artwork looks at the possible future through Sendai City, a work in progress created from his immense imagination, which sees the contemporary world shifted into the universe of a post punk megalopolis and materialised, over twenty years of activity, through different forms of expression (photography, drawing, video and installations). As the artist describes, the showdown has always had a setting that, unlike ancient battlefields, is now consumed in a space that represents a tout court contemporary place: the city, the perfect "container" for this conflict.


With this exhibition, Bolognesi opens a new chapter in the conflicts that scourge Sendai City and chooses to narrate it with a photographic project incarnating the bodily conflict: "Techno Mutant".
The colour black, protagonist of the photographs (100x70 cm), removes the boundaries between space and subject in an increasing conflict, so that the individual, in order to survive, is forced to transform. To do this, the artist uses elements of his research and once again chooses to work on models with recycled objects: "I tried to work with water guns , which are innocuous and playful forms that lend themselves to war, and with elements of common use such as tubes or electrician's boxes , easy to find in all the cities of the world", says Bolognesi. 
With these elements, the decontestualisation of objects, and therefore of the subject, allowed the artist to create a series of science fiction-inspired dark beings in full mutation, whose changes are fundamental to sustain the unceasing burden of conflict found both outside and within themselves. In this sense, according to Bolognesi, survival, and therefore life, forces us to change and to lose who we once were. 


It's no coincidence that the photograph names are inspired by the stars, to recall the origins of these beings that, at the same time, become the paradigm of a body that escapes, mingles and is disguised by the space surrounding it, the city. The photographs will show the   Curitiba spectator the unease of a contemporary society in conflict, in a universe where the setting is cancelled out by the body and disappears in darkness.


Marco Bolognesi


#marcobolognesi, from Bologna but effectively European, has lived in Rome, London and Vienna, and recently settled down in Bologna. Since the beginning of his career, he has focused on developing his artistic research on the creation of a futuristic and fantastic parallel world which comes to life thanks to the use of mixed techniques: from photography to drawings,  videos to installations.
He moved to London in 2002 and won The Artist in Residence Award at the Italian Cultural Institute, thanks to which the following year he exhibited "Woodland", an exhibition project focusing on the subject of genetically modified organisms, in collaboration with major designers such as Giorgio Armani, Vivienne Westwood, Dolce & Gabbana and many others. 
In 2006 he founded his Bomar Edition, a factory in London and began an artistic collaboration with the American gallerist Cynthia Corbett; in Italy he worked with the Carini and Donatini Gallery in San Giovanni Valdarno, with Paolo Nanni and with the Contemporary Gallery of Pescara. In 2008 his short film "Black Hole",based on the theme of hybridisation and cyborgs, won the Indie Short Film Competition in Florida and in the same year the curator Lorenzo Canova exhibited it in the Collezione Farnesina Experimenta. 
In 2009, he began a long collaboration with the Chinese gallerist Olyvia Kwok at the Olivia Fine Art Gallery in London and published "Protocol" with Einaudi, a cyberpunk graphic novel created together with the writer Carlo Lucarelli.
In 2012 the European Photography Exhibition presented "Humanescape", an artistic project curated by Walter Guadagnini. In 2014 the curator Sandro Parmiggiani selected it for the exhibition organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia for the celebration of Ludovico Ariosto's birth anniversary, for which Bolognesi created a cyberpunk-style reinterpretation of some of the Furious Orlando characters. In the same year, in collaboration with the critic and curator Valerio Dehò, the multi-faceted project "Sendai City" began - it developed in three personal exhibitions from the end of 2014 to the first half of 2015 at Kunst Meran, Abc in Bologna and PAN in Naples - in which the visual and narrative universe created by Bolognesi was presented, a continuous work in progress world which draws inspiration from post-punk culture and social science fiction.
Again in 2015, the curator Massimo Scaringella selected it for the Perspectivas Italianas pavilion at the Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Chile and Argentina and the following year it was exhibited at the Plastik Factory in Beijing, for the Italy-China Biennale. Just before the start of 2017 Bomar Studio Srl arrived in Bologna to create a new space made for the production and distribution of video art, documentaries and experimental cinema in general, and participated in the collective Our Place in Space at Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti (Venice), curated by Antonella Nota and Anna Caterina Bellati, in collaboration with ESA - The European Space Agency and NASA, with the work Mock-up. In May, the short film "Blue Unnatural" was screened at the Future Film Festival in Bologna and at the Ibrida Festival in Forlì.




MASSIMO SCARINGELLA


Massimo Scaringella is an independent curator of #contemporaryart and organiser of cultural events. In over thirty years of work in Italy and abroad he has presented many Italian and foreign artists, curating and collaborating in over 250 #contemporaryart exhibitions in 40 countries. He is always in contact with various events and local cultures; he has created an important link between Italian art and the rest of the world, particularly with Latin America, where he was Artistic Director of the 4th edition of the Biennale del Fin del Mondo 2014/2015. Director and Founder of ars maxjer contemporanea - cutting-edge cultural projects, in 2017 he was appointed curator of the Ivory Coast National Pavilion at the 57th International Art Biennale in Venice. 


USEFUL INFORMATION


Name: Sendai City: the Truth 
Where: #bienaldecuritiba 2017
Exhibition Space at MON - Museu Oscar Niemeyer
Curated by MASSIMO SCARINGELLA
Date: from SEPTEMBER 30TH 2017 TO FEBRUARY 25TH 2018
Official site: http://bienaldecuritiba.com.br/