Villa delle Rose’s promotion of artists active on the international scene continues with a first solo exhibition of the work of #antonimuntadas (Barcelona 1942) in an Italian museum, entitled Muntadas. Interconnessioni, curated by Cecilia Guida and Lorenzo Balbi.
Promoted by Istituzione #bologna Musei | #mambo – #museo d’Arte Moderna di #bologna, in col- laboration with Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo di Vitoria-Gasteiz, Álava, the partnership of Fondazione Federico Zeri and the patronage of Dipartimento delle Arti Alma Mater Studiorum Università di #bologna, the exhibition follows on from a solo show in the Basque #contemporaryart museum from 4 October 2019 to 12 January 2020.
The two twin exhibitions differ in their specific relationship with their exhibition spaces. The #bologna exhibition has been specially designed for 18th century Villa delle Rose’s ‘domestic’ di- mension, breathing life into a trajectory fostering an intimate relationship between exhibition and visitor starting from a warning at the entrance: “Warning! Perception requires involve- ment”.
Muntadas. Interconnessioni is one of ART CITY Bologna's main projects, an institutional pro- gramme of exhibitions, events and special initiatives sponsored by #bologna town council in con- junction with BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera.
The exhibition analyses a cross section of Muntadas’s work stretching from the early 1970s to today, establishing precise new meaning and relationship spheres between the recurring themes in his interdisciplinary work: globalisation, trans-national capitalism, the device notion, the public/private relationship, the relationship between monuments and memory, the ‘microphysics’ of power, the archive dialogue, the translation process, information circulation, the political image channelled by the media.
The title refers to a phrase by art and architecture historian Mark Wigley who calls the artist “more a city than a person, a network of spaces of exchange operation over long periods of time rather than an individual” - highlighting the nomadic travelling and untiring networking which has marked out Muntadas’s long career.
Muntadas’s research - in media landscapes which have led to him being seen as a Media Art pioneer in the conceptual art context - has explored art, social sciences, communication systems and their reciprocal interconnections since the beginning of his career. The landscape metaphor, according to the artist, explains how media systems (newspapers, radio, TV, web, digital media) create alternate scenarios to those traditionally identified by art historians as nature representations: they are new, technologically determined landscapes.
Keeping aloof from facile generalisations Muntadas works for individual projects, analysing his contexts and adapting to these in accordance with a site specific and time specific approach. This enables him to explore the complexities of the present and analyse the system's contradictions in depth. The medium best suited to the individual work is not determined a priori but evolves out of the artistic process.
The Villa delle Rose exhibition path shows us how Muntadas succeeds in varying his media: photography, video, publications, web, installations and town planning work.
The 21 works on show take the form of complex artifices which can be activated during the visitor-exhibition interaction, generating meaning: if the 1970s work is the contextual background, more recent work draws our attention to his current style, taking on social, political and communication themes and unmasking cases in which information channels claim a non-existent objectivity while censoring or promoting ideas to the extent of phenomena like fake news.
In line with his attention to the theme of public space and openness to the context of action, Muntadas opens up to dialogue with #bologna via two operations, one in an alternative space from the villa and the second from the starting point of the city’s history.
The first one is a documentation space at #bologna University's Fondazione Federico Zeri (Piazzetta Giorgio Morandi 2) which completes the exhibition, presenting various materials on three of the artist’s large scale recent projects: Asian Protocols (2011-2018), About Academia (2011 and 2017) and La construcción del miedo (2008-2013).
The second is a site specific public intervention concept entitled On Translation: I Piedistalli. The inspiration for the project was 59 busts of eminent men once located in Parco della Montagnola, removed as a result of vandalism and relocated to the Villa delle Rose attic since 1998 awaiting restoration. In Muntadas’s conceptual project, however, it is the pedestals supporting them rather than the busts themselves being the object of the work because these can be considered a metaphor for power in its various forms: political, cultural, economic and religious. In their autonomous status as significant bearers of significance, relocated to the public space, the pedestals become devices capable of reactivating a historic and cultural dialogue with the city’s fabric.
On the occasion of Muntadas. Interconnessioni a Corraini Edizioni trilingual volume is published with critical contributions from Beatriz Herráez, Lorenzo Balbi, Cecilia Guida, Arturo fito Rodríguez Bornaetxea, Roberto Pinto and Gabriel Villota Toyos.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by mediation work by MAMbo’s educational department to improve the exhibition’s user friendliness for visitors of all ages.
We would like to thak the galleries Moisés Pérez de Albeniz (Madrid) and Michela Rizzo (Venezia), Marcello Forin, Teresa Mulet and Andrea Nacach.
Antoni Muntadas
Muntadas. Interconnessioni
Curated by Cecilia Guida and Lorenzo Balbi
18 January - 22 March 2020
COMUNE DI BOLOGNA
ISTITUZIONE #bologna MUSEI
Via Don Minzoni, 14 - 40121 BOLOGNA
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