Coming Soon
.Coming Soon.
[Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin]
7th June 2018 – 7th October 2018
Artists
Lisetta Carmi | Leone Contini | Giulia Crispiani | Alessandra Ferrini | Kinkaleri | Beatrice Marchi | Marinella Pirelli | Francesco Pozzato | Davide Stucchi
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Before the era of Coordinated Universal Time, municipal (and other) clocks were
set according to the position of the sun, allowing for localized cosmic
interpretations. The speed achieved by eventual global synchronization—from the
movement of people to the exchange of goods and capital, telecommunications,
and later, financial speculation—produced the appetite for more and more
surplus value, and the general ideology of acceleration. If Foucault describe
the biopolitical control of populations through the management of everyday life
processes, today all mundane calendar activity is subjected to capitalization:
education, work, social, family and other personal obligations. From a Western
point of view, efficiency is the only mode of access to the new economy, and
slowness either a privilege or a slur.
The fetish for the “now” and the false urgency of the contemporary—to be
always-already up-to-date, on trend, on-the-move—reward instant gratification
at the expense of the laborious and the longer term, leaving little space for
reflection,retraction, failure, or even a wasted afternoon. Yet value
appreciates in time—how do you choose to spend it? Across a timeworn landscape,
abstract national essentialism splinters into complex regional, territorial,
and cultural specificities—a context in which many different histories and
temporalities collide, coincide, and co-exist. The
utopian alternate reality reveals itself as an alternate temporality, and the
lapse into provincialism a hegemonic assumption. Does our experience of
time—from the city, to the periphery, to the island—really change with our
physical geographical location? When does reproductive work occur in the
absence of wage-labor?
These questions implicate our peers, our generation, ourselves, our “own” time
and sense of it. Still the perpetual drive for productivity calls for creative
and intellectual, care and manual work to be in process at all times. Coming
Soon suggests both an answer to and deferral of this demand until a
moment that has yet to arrive—a situation marked by expectation that might as
well be now. The static and time-based artworks in the exhibition handle the
clock either technically or conceptually, with particular concern for how the
time we have can be re-valued, used and shared.
Performed for the exhibition opening, Giulia Crispiani’s one-act play
anthropomorphizes the characters Yesterday and Tomorrow, setting them in
competitive tension. Francesco Pozzato expresses a funereal futurity in an
installation that recasts camping gear as ancient Egyptian burial goods. In an
animated film, Beatrice Marchi’s alter-ego rides a streetcar across an accelerated
history of landscape painting while remaining in a stagnant present.
Marinella Pirelli’s experimental films paint a picture of the psychological and
environmental context of postwar Italy through the material of the natural
world: a lake and a delicate flower’s petals. The plant life in Leone Contini’s
installation transforms ideas of national territory through the cultivation of
smuggled seeds. Alessandra Ferrini reorients the economic and historical
circumstances of the Mediterranean region, in order to see present relation
between Italy and the African continent through legacies of Italian colonialism
and fascism.
During their long-term collaborative performance project, Kinkaleri staged
countless “small deaths” in urban capitals to prefigure the end of the era of
the West. Lisetta Carmi’s timeless photographs depict subtleties of presence,
absence, and marginality within Italian society. Davide Stucchi extrapolates
the drawn line from two-dimensions into the space occupied by the body and back
again, working out and across materialities that slowly build up and decline.
—Mira Asriningtyas, Nora Heidorn, Kari Rittenbach
Turin, May 2018
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[Click : Coming Soon Reader]