Contemporary Art
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    AA. VV.

    Khalil Rabah. Through the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind

    pages: 256

    format: 15 x 21.5 cm
    publication date: April 2024
    package: paperback
    language: Italian

    isbn 9788877573124



    €37,00

    In Turin, for the first time, Khalil Rabah's Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind takes the form of an archaeological site, in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself in a historical narrative rendered through testimonies and clues. In the spaces of the Fondazione Merz, the artist challenges the role of the museum as a mere container and focuses on art as a tool for the interpretation and correction of history. Khalil Rabah's artistic practice ranges between painting, sculpture and installation to construct a lucid and careful analysis of history and its interpretations, questioning their narrative modes and the perception they generate. Fundamental themes such as change, memory and identity intersect in his work, creating new ways of representing communities and relationships. ways of representing communities and the relationships that make them up.

    The catalogue accompanies the project conceived by Khalil Rabah for the Fondazione Merz and was created as an extension of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (PMNHH). Developed as a nomadic museum institution that the artist inaugurated in 2003, Rabah's museum, which includes departments such as geology, botany and palaeontology, has seen several iterations around the world and is identified as a project in constant evolution.

     

    Khalil Rabah is a Palestinian conceptual artist born in Jerusalem in 1961. He studied Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington and has resided in the United States for over a decade. His most recent solo exhibitions include Casa Árabe, Madrid (2016); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2015); e-flux, New York (2013); and Beirut Art Center (2012). As well as major group exhibitions, including Manifesta 12 Palermo (2018); Sharjah Biennial (2017); Marrakech Biennial (2016); Kochi-Muziris Biennial (2014); Thessaloniki Biennial (2013); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Mathaf, Doha (2010); and Venice Biennale (2009). Rabah is the initiator and artistic director of the Riwaq Biennale and a co-founder of the Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem. From 2011 to 2015 he served on the curricular committee of Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace programme in Beirut, Lebanon.

  • Francesco Lo Savio. Colore Luce Spazio

    I Mostri Saggi

    preface by Maria Passaro

    pages: 186
    format: 16 x 22.5 cm
    publication date: January 2024
    package: paperback
    language: Italian

    isbn 9788877573087



    €18,00

    Rome, end of the 1950s, when the Italian art scene is in great turmoil. One of the protagonists of the debate on the renewal of the arts is the painter Francesco Lo Savio, one of the most problematic personalities of the Italian post-informal avant-garde.
    Lo Savio is a participant in the (not only Italian but international) revolution of a generation of young artists who want to break away from the previous Informal culture and move towards a new mechanism of artwork construction, centred on the qualities inherent to painting itself.
    There was a lack of a more detailed and organic view of his work in the critical literature. Angelo Di Modica's complex work constitutes a significant contribution to fully reconstructing the difficult and significant artistic and human history of Francesco Lo Savio. It investigates the artist's entire career in all its fundamental passages and returns an image of him that is as defined as possible. It measures the reasons and circumstances of his art, shedding new light on moments of his research that have not yet been sufficiently investigated and at the same time rediscovering themes and personalities that have made up the story of the last century.

     

    Angelo Di Modica holds a PhD in Methods and Methodologies of Archaeological and Art-Historical Research (2022) and he is a research fellow at the Department of Cultural Heritage Sciences, University of Salerno. An art historian, he has published essays and contributions on Italian artistic experiences of the 20th century with a focus on the Roman scene between the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  • La notte di Sant'Anna

    edited by Valentina Bruschi
    Texts by Laura Barreca, Angelo Cucco, Michela Eremita, Sabrina Masiero, Maria Rosa Sossai, Mariaenza Puccia.
    Conversation between Valentina Bruschi and Concetta Modica
    pages: 96
    format: 20 x 15 cm
    publication date: October 2023
    package: bound
    language: Italian/English
    isbn 9788877573063



    €12,00

    The book tells the story of artist Concetta Modica's project, winner of the PAC - Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea 2021 - Linea committenza call for bids, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and commissioned by the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Palermo). The work she realised is linked to the historical events of the relic of St. Anne, the patron saint of Castelbuono, preserved in the chapel dedicated to her in the Ventimiglia Castle, home of the Museum. It is a large blue felt cloth printed in ink using a special intaglio technique, representing the image of the sky above Castelbuono on the night of 4 May 1454, the date on which the relic was transferred from the town of Geraci to Castelbuono. The image of the starry sky was obtained with the collaboration of the GAL Hassin Foundation - International Centre for Astronomical Sciences of Isnello. The project also makes use of the contribution of the embroiderers of Castelbuono and Isnello, renews the value of collaboration between institutions and communities and promotes a reinterpretation of the cultural heritage by encouraging cooperation between artists, artisans and the territory. The book contains texts by the president of the museum's board of directors, Mariaenza Puccia; museum director, Laura Barreca; curator of the public programme, Maria Rosa Sossai; anthropologist Angelo Cucco; astrophysicist Sabrina Masiero, head of didactics - GAL Hassin Foundation; Michela Eremita, co-founder of the Children's Art Museum of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena; and a conversation between the artist and Valentina Bruschi, curator of the project.

     

    Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives and works in Milan. Her works reflect on the present and its paradoxes, in particular on the concept of the 'contemporary epic'.

  • Scolpire il vento

    edited by Laura Barreca
    pages: 96
    format: 21 x 14.8 cm
    publication date: October 2023
    package: paperback
    language: Italian
    isbn 9788877573056



    €15,00

    The volume constitutes the catalogue of Francesco Bartoli's project for mudaC | Museo delle arti Carrara and brings together images, drawings, photos, notes, and sketches documenting the genesis of the film of the same name and its final installation. The volume is conceived to disseminate the project on display and as a vehicle to promote tourism and the local cultural heritage. The project "Sculpting the Wind" by Francesco Bartoli, winner of the PAC - Plan for Contemporary Art 2021 of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, curated by Laura Barreca, included the production of a film and it is one of the 39 projects selected from the 98 proposals that reached the 2021 edition of the call for proposals, for the acquisition, production, and valorization of works of contemporary art and creativity destined for the Italian public heritage. The title of the work is freely inspired by Andrej Tarkovskij's famous book "Sculpting Time", and in line with the museum's cultural orientation, it takes the form of a poetic narration and a dialogue with the territory of the Apuan Alps, linking together past and present, sculpture and landscape, art and technological innovation. The project was also realised with the collaboration of the Omero Museum for the Blind in Ancona and in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. "The production of a work as complex as Bartoli's," commented the museum's director Laura Barreca, "is an extraordinary opportunity to reinterpret the Carrara area through creativity and poetic intuition, the outcome of which will be a film that will become part of the mudaC's permanent collection, thanks to the support that the DGCC has allocated to support Italian museums through the PAC Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea 2021.

  • PALERMO MON AMOUR

    Enzo Sellerio, Letizia Battaglia, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi, Lia Pasqualino

    Texts by Giorgio Vasta, Valentina Greco, Olivia e Antonio Sellerio (Archivio Sellerio), Marta Sollima (Archivio Letizia Battaglia), Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi, Lia Pasqualino

    pages: 184
    format: 14,5 x 21 cm
    date of publication: October 2023
    pictures: 109 a colori e b/n
    binding: softbound hardcover
    language: Italian
    isbn 9788877573025



    €37,00

    Catalogue of the exhibition Palermo Mon Amour curated by Valentina Greco for the Fondazione Merz in collaboration with the Centro internazionale di fotografia Letizia Battaglia and the Enzo Sellerio archive. The book tells the story of Palermo from the 1950s to 1992 in images. A story that has the rhythm similar to a visual walk through the research and intuitions of five photographers, five gazes, who have investigated the poetic imagery of Palermo with different feelings, recounting a city in continuous deflagration, and not always recomposed in its complexity. The subject of a gentle, playful, cultured, anti-rhetorical vision, which is also an acute testimony to the social scene of the 1950s and 1960s, dense with stratified situations of misery and degradation but awaiting a possible civil and economic rebirth, Palermo underwent the further assault of the 1970s, of daily events of ferocious chronicle, until 1992, the year in which it seemed, once again, that everything could change. Through the photographs of Enzo Sellerio, Letizia Battaglia, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi and Lia Pasqualino we understand a new visual code, the sequences of their photographs amplify our feelings and add notions to those we have acquired of what it is necessary to see in order to position oneself in the world.

    In addition to the curatorial text by Valentina Greco, the book is enriched by biographical contributions by Olivia and Antonio Sellerio for the Enzo Sellerio Archive, Marta Sollima for the Letizia Battaglia Archive, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi and Lia Pasqualino, as well as a moving story by Giorgio Vasta.

  • Mario Merz Prize. Fourth Edition

    pages: 48
    format: 14,5 x 21 cm
    date of publication: November 2022
    binding: paperback with dust-cover and leaflet
    language: Italian/English
    isbn: 9788877572936



    €15,00

    This small book/catalogue brings together the biographies of the artists and musicians who were finalists in the Fourth Edition of the international prize that the Fondazione Merz dedicates to the figure and work of Mario Merz, to whom it is named. The Mario Merz Prize, created in 2013, was created with the desire to launch a new project projected towards the future of art and to identify and highlight personalities in the field of art and allow young composers to propose themselves for an innovative contemporary music project.

    The two sections of the Prize, music and visual arts, saw for this edition the participation of artists Yto Barrada, Paolo Cirio, Christina Forrer, Anne Hardy, He Xiangyu and Koo Jeong A. The finalists were Katherine Balch, William Dougherty, Farzia Fallah, Füsun Köksal and Claudia Jane Scroccaro. The book is completed by images of the works that are part of the finalists' exhibition, held at the Fondazione Merz in Turin from 9 June to 25 September 2022.