RED STAMP ART GALLERY
presents
THE BODY LINK
FIRST PART
ARMIDA GANDINI
LORY GINEDUMONT
VIRGINIA MONTEVERDE
JEAN SADAO
ELLEN SCHIPPERS
SARA TIRELLI
MARILENA VITA
OPENING: SATURDAY 19 MAY 2018 - 17:00 / 21:00
EXHIBITION: 19 MAY - 16 JUNE 2018
CURATOR: SONIA ARATA
ADDRESS: RUSLAND 22 – 1012 CL AMSTERDAM – NL Map >
Press Release - Short Version - "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
Artists ans Artworks - "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
Flyer - "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
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Red Stamp Art Gallery is pleased to present THE BODY LINK I, first part of an exhibition that, through the personal sensibilities and readings of contemporary artists, throws a look at the wide and universal theme of the body, physical connection that binds the human conscience to the material sphere, to sensoriality, to the awareness of the identity, to experiencing life and being in the world, within the dimension of space and time.
The first phase of the exposition, which will open on Saturday the 19th of May from 17:00 till 21:00 and can be visited until the 16th of June 2018, proposes the vision and insights on the topic of seven international authors (from Italy, France, Japan and the Netherlands): Armida Gandini, Lory Ginedumont, Virginia Monteverde, Jean Sadao, Ellen Schippers, Sara Tirelli, Marilena Vita.
THE BODY LINK, curated by Sonia Arata, suggests, with an open title, the predisposition and the interest to receive the multiple interpretative meanings offered by each of the presented artworks: video and photographic works, the latter however always related to a dynamic sequentiality or a performative action.
The show, which is composed of two parts, will continue during a subsequent exhibition event, in October 2018, through the point of view of a second group of artists.
Event partner: Radisson Blu Hotel, Amsterdam
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THE BODY LINK - FIRST PART
Artists and Artworks
Armida Gandini (1968, lives and works in Brescia, Italy) places at the center of her artistic investigation the individual and the theme of identity, sought in the relationship with the world: in many of her works an indefinite empty space, symbol of a mental field and interior theater, is the place where psychological vicissitudes are staged in various situations of confrontation with the outside and with the other. The body is read by the artist as a depiction of the personal identity which seeks self-knowledge, self-confidence, awareness and the confirmation of its own strength through the overcoming of difficulties and obstacles that life entails. In "Pregnant Silence", video work that combines film shots with drawn and animated images, the physique of the protagonist lies immersed in a dense, heavy and aqueous environment, an actual limbo that seems to isolate her from any interaction and make any move difficult, by holding her in suspense and dragging her at times into a sort of heavy sleep or oblivion: there is no communication with existence outside, which is perceived as a confused magma. The psyche of the person is confronted in this case with a condition of immobility and closure, in which the search for clarity is a difficult process and where more than ever the relationship with the outside is reversed in the difficult situation of a necessary face to face with oneself and one’s own uncertainties and fears, inside an oppressive state of claustrophobic isolation and inertia, but, as the title suggests, full of possibilities: the artist seems to portray in a contemporary and new way the figure of "melancholy" and of the slow and difficult crossing of this introspective and spiritual passage of "black humor", of an alchemical "nigredo", of a "spleen", indolence or malice of living, a territory of profound closeness of the soul with the dimension of emptiness, of lack, of the limit, of suffering, which needs to be crossed to get out of it reborn, enriched and renewed.
Lory Ginedumont (1964, lives and works between Italy and France) uses various means (photography, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, writing, painting, performance) to express the intimacy of her inner and emotional universe, under the ascendancy
of the intense lyric vibration that characterizes all of her works: for the artist the body and its representation are closely linked to one's personal experience, while the employed medium is chosen according to the potential of translating the message that she from time to time intends to transmit . The photographic sequence "J'ai pas envie d'etre un ange" and the homonymous video work related to it, (which is presented to the public for the first time at "The Body Link"
) sees the artist as protagonist, immersed in an action in which the angelic connotation of the wings is an emblem
of a psychological and spiritual condition from which she needs to strip herself from:
through the words of the autograph poem from which the two works originate, it's possible to understand the intensity of the desire to get rid of a feeling of immateriality that makes her feel inaccessible, the indefinite ubiquity proper to the celestial sphere, abstracted from the mundane, to fully live in the physical world, descending into a yearned corporeity, finally free from caging behavioral constraints. The body is in this case the personification of the material vehicle of the personality immersed in the plane of experiences and in the passage of time, which becomes a means of experimentation and knowledge, compared to the opposite psychic situation, symbolized by the angel, of ethereal purity, of keeping oneself out of existence to be everywhere, but from above, without ever really experiencing. Here is the text of the poem: “j'ai pas envie d'être un ange! plus envie d'ailes, de ciel,d'éternel. pas envie d'être invisible, inaccessible. plus envie d'être là ou là-bas, ici-bas. étrange envie de tomber des nues, sans jamais plus prendre mon envol.” ("I no longer want to be an angel, I no longer want wings, heaven, eternity, I no longer want to be invisible, inaccessible, I no longer want to be here and over here or there
, strange desire to fall from the clouds without ever resuming the flight. ").
Virginia Monteverde (1969, lives and works in Genova, Italy) directs her artistic choices towards digital mediums, by experimenting their peculiar expressive potential through video art, photography, multimedia installation and digital painting: in this fluid era of globalization, media communication and rapid technological changes, the artist adapts her expressive means to the current habits of use and reading of messages, with the intention to establish a direct and deep interaction with the viewer, starting from a level of a fine-tuned structuring to then reach a subsequent emotional one. Her works, characterized by essentiality, order and rationality of classical derivation, convey reflections on the individual and collective plots of a society in upheaval and radical mutation, of which the artist wants to transmit the new liquid perceptions. In the series "CodeLife, The Artists", the nudity of the body, the expression of the subjects, the surface of each person's epidermis are protagonist, in a gallery of half-bust figures where the portrait tradition is renewed into a contemporary version: added to the effigy of the person, captured in a given instant of time, in the here and now of the moment of the photo shoot, is the temporal dimension of the past, of the personal experience, of the story of each of the subjects, contained within the 30 seconds of a video of which the link to access is encoded in the QRCode that everyone exposes "tattooed" on the chest, at the height of heart, as a numerical seal to decipher, able to enclose a plurality of data, in this case the same ones deposited, marked and layered on the skin of each individual, as a kind of not immediately accessible writing, traced by the passing of years and experiences. The fast flow of moments of life from childhood to the instant of the pose in front of the artist who portrays them "lays bare" the six artists and offers thirty impressions of insight almost "stolen" from the intimate memory of each; every shot in turn seems to take on the value of a new code that mysteriously then generates the following temporal fragment, as a sort of "Chinese boxes" configuration in the inscrutable unknown of the unravelling of existence. The speed of the frames in the video creates a parallel both with the extreme rapidity of information diffusion in the modern world and with the suddenness of the associations of the mind; the gaze is key and leads to the unfathomable abyss of the individual, a precious vital cipher that is transmitted to us in this "trailer" of the life of each of the protagonists.
Virginia Monteverde - C.V. >>>
Jean Sadao (1976, lives and works in Tokyo, Japan) expresses himself through an artistic production that combines cinema, theater, performance and video art. At the center of his research there is the investigation about the identity in connection with today's society, in which the individual must relate, face and adapt to ever faster transformations. In a globalized scenario the artist observes with particular attention the nodal point of the connection between our original natural surroundings and the current urbanized and technological ones , also read as the relationship between tradition and past, present and future, between East and West, in a perspective that in a certain way abstracts itself from the immediate, through a broad, overall vision, from above, sometimes employing surreal and symbolic images or compositions that can be read as a sort of visual alphabet. This is the case of "The Multi-sensory Impossibility of a Worm", which will have its première at the “The Body Link”; the work raises questions about the body, the sensorial potentialities and their limits, and establishes the hypothesis of an unusual tactile and bodily language as a means of communication able to approach universality and naturalness, by questioning its possible implications in terms of influence on the person and on the community. The artist looks at physicality in the possible expansion of sensoriality and reflects on the way in which methods of communication necessarily influence the formation of the structure of the self, culture and lifestyle. The stratification of semantic levels, the perceptual displacement in decoding the sequences of the nine squares in which the artist breaks up the screen area, force the viewer to engage in an unusual mode of reading, for which he is not yet trained, in order to coordinate the multiple visual and auditory impulses, including the codes of the silent sign language and the meaning of the action of the protagonists, who seem to test each other, looking for an alternative contact and unconventional forms of interaction and knowledge.
Ellen Schippers (lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands), uses performances, sculptural dresses, installations, video and photographic works to explore the concept of body understood as an expression of the subtle part of the person, of the interiority and of the psychic essence, whit the purpose to show their rarefied nuances and tensions, from the inside of one temporal and spatial dimension in suspense ; the artist aims, through a hypnotic and emotional involvement that's put into effect through multiple expressive strategies, for a cathartic and decisive reaction, which can lead to the recovery of the integrity of the soul beyond the stereotypes and pre-packaged structures imposed by the pressures of society on the authenticity and uniqueness of the individual. "The Birth of Venus" belongs to a series of triptych-works that compositionally derive from the traditional three-panel framework and incorporate photography and video into a sort of today's tabernacle; the body is in this case the mythical and archetypical one of a divinity, numinous appearance of an entity with sensual connotations, the features called into question are the immortal and sublime ones of the Goddess Venus: the representation of her genesis from a shell, inspired by the homonymous work by Botticelli, wants to celebrate harmony, beauty and love, embodied in this case in a feminine guise. The work intends to be a living picture and is permeated by an aura of sacredness and a devotional sense in its passage from the "ritual" enacting of the birth event (by means of a theatrical action, costumes and choreography for which were designed and directed by the artist herself), to the deferred and narrative-evocative repetition of the occurrence through a video of the video: the projection of the filmed performance on the "backdrop" of a transparent plastic bust, itself a new cross-reference to the sculptural representation of the goddess, gets in turn recorded and constitutes the video loop sequence visible on the screen enclosed between the two doors; the object, ad infinitum, refers to the supernatural event.
The artistic research of Sara Tirelli (1979, lives and works between Venice and Rome, Italy) moves between cinema, art, new technologies and virtual reality, mediums which are used to explore perceptive and cognitive processes, to investigate the malleability of the concept of "real", the influence of technological means, of media and information on memory, individual and collective history and identity and on the relationship between personal imagination and the contemporary codified imaginary. The artist is interested in studying the phenomenology of the gaze, the undefined area of the gap and the links between what is perceived and what is actual , testing new levels of fruition and unconventional modes of representation and narration. In the video work "Picnolepsy", a character is placed in a spatial dimension that's made ambiguous by an immersive context of anaglyphic vision and 360-degrees audio: the distorted stereoscopy, arising from the repetition of the same action and from the filming of the two shots from slightly out of sync points of view, is meant to put into practice an acute reflection on the boundary between truth and fiction, between the real, its knowledge, that's influenced by learned, inherited mechanisms, and its continuous reconstruction and modification as a projection towards the outside world. Various visual and auditory expedients aim to involve the viewer in an uncertain sensorial circumstance, but they are also used to enlarge the setting to a wider situation (sounds which tell the presence of a second person on the scene, the two silhouettes of the actress, which sometimes separate and split, thus allowing us, through the unveiling of the the trick of film simulation, to see what would not be normally possible). The idea of the body is analyzed here in a meaning of staged, depicted body, together with the whole potential of a recognition that's amplified by such a representation: it is a reading that's reversed within the body of the spectator who watches, which is investigated in turn as a sensor of subtly unsettling audio-visual strategies. The whole sequence is dotted with clues concerning the deciphering of deceptiveness, of ambiguity, of the gappiness of the understanding of the truth that can occur both through its fictional re-proposition and through the mental and cognitive dynamics themselves: starting from the title, which refers to a state of brief moments of absence of consciousness or to its invention by the subject, to then continue with the hints suggested by the spoken texts, the actions of the protagonist, the images and the objects used as symbolic traces of this puzzle.
Sara Tirelli - Short Bio - C.V.>>>
Marilena Vita (1972, lives and works between Syracuse and Milan, Italy) uses different means of expression (painting, installation, photography, video art, performance) with the aim of bringing into the existence in the real world universes and conditions that she encountered in the private sphere of the soul, in the intimacy of the psyche, thereby allowing herself and the spectators to be confronted with experiences and contexts belonging to a universal imagery and emotional sphere. The bodily dimension in all of her works is experienced in first person, in staging performative actions which are executed always only once and never repeated, or in entering into situations where she herself acts as the subject of photographic self-portraits; in the video work "Non essendo è (“In not being it is”) the body is represented through its negative, the total black of a shadow that does not have the value of the dark side of the unconscious, but is connected to light, to the primordial energy source of every form of life in the universe. It is a fertile black, a vital, creative one, sparkle of awareness that from the fruitful "nothing" vibrates a first beat, to start a journey in the direction of self-knowledge, to experience the infinity of the facets of the self, which spring from a unique matrix. The dark presences, whose various personalities and dispositions of mind can be guessed from their various silhouettes, cadences of gestures and attitudes, move, without meeting, in a single scenario, motionless location that seems to exist from an indefinable time, linked to absorbed memories from every experience that has been lived there, a place that refers to the idea of impermanence and simultaneously to an a-temporal situation. The denial of the presence becomes a more powerful and communicative form than a representation of it and is the messenger of the original absolute in search of its identity: it is the impossible glance towards oneself that only a mirror or the eye of others can give us back, it is the multiple alterity of the infinite possibilities of being, the plurality of uniqueness, which contains everything.
Texts by Sonia Arata, Amsterdam, May 2018
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THE BODY LINK
FIRST PART
Armida Gandini | Lory Ginedumont | Virginia Monteverde | Jean Sadao | Ellen Schippers | Sara Tirelli | Marilena Vita
Opening: 19 May 2018 – 17:00 / 21:00
Exhibition: 19 May - 16 June 2018
Curator: Sonia Arata
Event partner:
Radisson Blu Hotel, Amsterdam >>>
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Red Stamp Art Gallery
Rusland 22 - 1012 CL Amsterdam – NL
http://www.redstampartgallery.com/
Tel.: +31 20 4208684
Mob. NL: +31 6 46406531
Mob. IT: +39 347 1917003
RED STAMP ART GALLERY
presenta
THE BODY LINK
PRIMA PARTE
ARMIDA GANDINI
LORY GINEDUMONT
VIRGINIA MONTEVERDE
JEAN SADAO
ELLEN SCHIPPERS
SARA TIRELLI
MARILENA VITA
INAUGURAZIONE: SABATO 19 MAGGIO 2018 - 17:00 / 21:00
MOSTRA: 19 MAGGIO - 16 GIUGNO 2018
CURATORE: SONIA ARATA
INDIRIZZO: RUSLAND 22 – 1012 CL AMSTERDAM – NL Mappa >
Artisti e Opere - "The Body Link - Prima Parte - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
Flyer - "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
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Red Stamp Art Gallery è lieta di presentare THE BODY LINK I, prima parte di una mostra che, attraverso le personali sensibilità e letture di artisti contemporanei, getta uno sguardo di indagine sull'ampio e universale tema del corpo, collegamento fisico che lega la coscienza umana alla sfera materiale, alla sensorialità, alla consapevolezza dell' identità, allo sperimentare la vita e l'essere nel mondo, all'interno della dimensione di spazio e tempo.
La prima fase dell' esposizione, che si inaugurerà Sabato 19 Maggio dalle 17:00 alle 21:00 e sarà visitabile fino al 16 Giugno 2018, propone la visione e gli spunti di riflessione sull'argomento di sette autori internazionali (da Italia, Francia, Giappone e Olanda): Armida Gandini, Lory Ginedumont, Virginia Monteverde, Jean Sadao, Ellen Schippers, Sara Tirelli, Marilena Vita.
THE BODY LINK, curata da Sonia Arata, suggerisce, con un titolo aperto, la predisposizione e l'interesse ad accogliere le molteplici accezioni interpretative offerte da ciascuno dei lavori presentati: opere di video-arte e fotografiche, in quest'ultimo caso sempre comunque legate ad una sequenzialità dinamica o ad un'azione performativa.
La mostra, che si articola in due capitoli, proseguirà in un successivo appuntamento espositivo, nel mese di Ottobre 2018, attraverso il punto di vista di un secondo gruppo di artisti.
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THE BODY LINK – PRIMA PARTE
Artisti e Opere
Armida Gandini (1968, vive e lavora a Brescia) pone al centro della sua indagine artistica l'individuo ed il tema dell'identità, cercata nella relazione col mondo: in molte delle sue opere un indefinito spazio vuoto, simbolo di un campo mentale e teatro interiore, è il luogo dove vengono messe in scena vicissitudini psicologiche in svariate situazioni di confronto con l'esterno e con l'altro. Il corpo è letto dall'artista come raffigurazione dell'identità personale che cerca, attraverso il superamento di difficoltà e ostacoli che la vita comporta, l'auto-conoscenza, la fiducia in se', la consapevolezza e la conferma della propria forza. In “Pregnant Silence”, opera video che unisce riprese filmiche ad immagini disegnate ed animate, il fisico della protagonista giace immerso in un ambiente acqueo, denso, pesante, materico, vero e proprio limbo che pare isolarla da ogni interazione e renderne difficoltosi i movimenti, tenendola sospesa e trascinandola a tratti in una sorta di greve sonno o oblio: non c'è comunicazione con l'esistenza al di fuori, percepita come un magma confuso . La psiche della persona si confronta in questo caso con una condizione di immobilità e chiusura, in cui cercare chiarezza è un processo faticoso e dove più che mai il rapporto con l'esterno è ribaltato nella difficile situazione di un necessario faccia a faccia con se stessi e le proprie incertezze e paure , calati in un opprimente stato di isolamento claustrofobico e di inerzia ma, come si evince dal titolo, pregno di possibilità: l'artista sembra quasi raffigurare in chiave contemporanea e nuova la figura della “melancolia” e del lento e difficoltoso attraversamento di questo passaggio introspettivo e spirituale dell'”umor nero”, di un' alchemica “nigredo”, di uno “spleen”, accidia o mal di vivere, territorio animico di vicinanza profonda con la dimensione della vacuità, della mancanza, del limite, della sofferenza, da attraversare per uscirne rinati, arricchiti e rinnovati.
Lory Ginedumont (1964, vive e lavora tra Francia e Italia) si avvale di svariati mezzi (fotografia, video, installazione, scultura, disegno, scrittura, pittura, performance) per esprimere l'intimo del suo universo interiore ed emotivo, sotto l'ascendente dell'intensa vibrazione lirica che connota tutti i suoi lavori: per l'artista il corpo e la sua rappresentazione sono strettamente legati al proprio vissuto personale, mentre il medium impiegato è scelto in base al potenziale di tradurre al meglio il messaggio che intende di volta in volta trasmettere. La sequenza fotografica “J'ai pas envie d'etre un ange” e l'omonima opera video ad essa correlata, (che per “The Body Link” è alla sua prima presentazione al pubblico) vede protagonista l'artista stessa, calata in un' azione in cui il connotato angelico delle ali è emblema di una condizione psicologica e spirituale di cui spogliarsi: attraverso le parole della poesia autografa, da cui le due opere traggono origine, si comprende l'intensità del desiderio di liberarsi da una sensazione di immaterialità che rende inaccessibili, dall'indefinita ubiquità propria della sfera celeste, astratta dal mondano, per vivere appieno il mondo fisico, calandosi in una anelata corporeità, finalmente liberi da vincoli comportamentali che ingabbiano. Il corpo è in questo caso personificazione del veicolo materiale della personalità, immersa nel piano delle esperienze e della vita, nello scorrere del tempo, che diviene mezzo di sperimentazione e conoscenza, rispetto alla opposta situazione psichica, simboleggiata dall'angelo, di eterea purezza, di un tenersi al di fuori dall'esistenza per essere ovunque, ma dall'alto, senza mai esperire realmente. Ecco il testo della poesia: “j'ai pas envie d'être un ange! plus envie d'ailes, de ciel,d'éternel. pas envie d'être invisible, inaccessible. plus envie d'être là ou là-bas, ici-bas. étrange envie de tomber des nues, sans jamais plus prendre mon envol.” (“non ho piu voglia d essere un angelo! non ho piu voglia di ali, di cielo, di eterno. non ho piu voglia di essere invisibile, inacessibile. non ho piu voglia di essere di qua e di là o quaggiù, strana voglia di cadere dalle nuvole senza mai piu riprendere il volo.”).
Virginia Monteverde (1969, vive e lavora a Genova) dirige le sue scelte artistiche verso i medium digitali, sperimentandone le peculiari potenzialità espressive attraverso la videoarte, la fotografia, l'installazione multimediale e la pittura digitale: in quest'era fluida di globalizzazione, di comunicazione mediatica e velocissimi cambiamenti tecnologici, l'artista adegua i mezzi espressivi alle attuali consuetudini di fruizione e lettura dei messaggi, con l'intento di instaurare un'interazione diretta e profonda con lo spettatore, partendo da un piano di calibrata strutturazione per raggiungere poi un successivo livello emozionale. Le sue opere, caratterizzate da essenzialità, ordine e razionalità di impianto classico, veicolano riflessioni sulle trame individuali e collettive di una società in sommovimento e radicale mutazione, di cui l'artista vuole restituire le nuove percezioni liquide. Nella serie “CodeLife, Gli artisti” la nudità del corpo, l'espressione dei soggetti, la superficie dell'epidermide di ciascuno sono protagonisti, in una galleria di figure a mezzobusto dove la tradizione del ritratto si rinnova in una versione attuale: alla valenza dell'effigie della persona, catturata in un dato attimo del tempo, nel qui ed ora del momento della fotografia, si aggiunge la dimensione temporale del passato, del vissuto personale, della storia di ognuno dei soggetti, racchiusa nei 30 secondi di flashback di un video il cui link di accesso è codificato nel QRCode che ognuno espone “tatuato” sul petto, all'altezza del cuore, come sigillo numerico da decifrare, in grado di racchiudere molteplici dati, in questo caso gli stessi depositati, segnati e stratificati sulla pelle di ognuno, come una scrittura non immediatamente accessibile, tracciata dal passare degli anni e dalle esperienze. Il veloce fluire di attimi di vita dall'infanzia all'istante della posa di fronte all'artista che li ritrae “mette a nudo” i sei artisti e offre trenta impressioni di insight quasi “rubate” alla memoria intima di ciascuno; ogni scatto a sua volta pare assumere il valore di un nuovo codice che in modo misterioso ha poi generato il frammento temporale seguente, come una sorta di configurazione a “scatole cinesi”nell'incognita imperscrutabile del dipanarsi dell'esistenza. La velocità dello scorrere dei frame nel video pone un parallelo sia con l'estrema rapidità di diffusione delle informazioni nel mondo moderno, che con la repentinità delle associazioni della mente; lo sguardo è chiave e porta all'abisso insondabile dell'individuo, preziosa cifra vitale che ci viene trasmessa in questo “trailer” della vita di ciascuno dei protagonisti.
Virginia Monteverde - C.V. >>>
Jean Sadao (1976, vive e lavora a Tokyo, Giappone) si esprime attraverso una produzione artistica che coniuga cinema, teatro, performance e video-arte. Al centro della sua ricerca è l'indagine sull'identità in connessione con la società odierna, in cui l'individuo deve relazionarsi ed affrontare, adattandovisi, trasformazioni sempre più veloci. In uno scenario globalizzato l'artista osserva con particolare attenzione il punto nodale della relazione tra il contesto naturale originario e quello urbanizzato e tecnologico, letta anche come rapporto tra tradizione e passato, presente e futuro, tra oriente e occidente, in un'ottica che in un certo qual modo si astrae dall'immediato, mediante una visione ampia, complessiva, dall'alto, impiegando a volte immagini surreali e simboliche o composizioni leggibili come una sorta di alfabeto visivo. E' il caso questo di “The Multi-sensory Impossibility of a Worm” (“L'Impossibilità Multi-sensoriale di un Verme”), per la mostra “The Body Link” alla sua première; l'opera pone degli interrogativi sul corpo, le potenzialità sensoriali ed i loro limiti, istituendo l'ipotesi di un inconsueto linguaggio tattile e corporale come mezzo di comunicazione che si avvicini all' universalità e alla naturalità, interrogandosi sui suoi possibili risvolti in termini di influenza sulla persona e sulla collettività. L'artista guarda alla fisicità nella possibile espansione della sensorialità, riflettendo sulla maniera in cui i metodi comunicativi influiscano necessariamente sulla formazione della struttura del sé, sulla cultura, sullo stile di vita. La stratificazione di livelli semantici, lo spiazzamento percettivo nel decodificare le sequenze dei nove riquadri in cui l'artista scompone l'area dello schermo, costringono lo spettatore a cimentarsi ad un'inusitata modalità di lettura , a cui non è ancora allenato, per coordinare i molteplici impulsi visivi e sonori, tra cui i codici della lingua muta dei segni e il senso dell'azione dei protagonisti, che sembrano testarsi a vicenda, cercando un contatto alternativo e forme non convenzionali di interazione e conoscenza.
Ellen Schippers (vive e lavora ad Amsterdam, Paesi Bassi) utilizza performance, abiti scultura, installazioni, opere video e fotografiche per esplorare il concetto di corpo inteso come espressione della parte sottile della persona, della sua interiorità e essenza psichica, di cui mira a mostrare le rarefatte sfumature e le tensioni, dall'interno di una dimensione temporale e spaziale altra e sospesa; l'artista punta , attraverso un ipnotico coinvolgimento emotivo attuato mediante molteplici strategie espressive, ad una reazione catartica e risolutiva, che possa condurre verso il recupero di un'integrità animica al di là degli stereotipi e delle strutture preconfezionate imposte dalle pressioni della società sull'autenticità e unicità dell'individuo. “La nascita di Venere” appartiene ad una serie di opere-trittico che derivano compositivamente dal tradizionale impianto a tre pannelli e incorporano in una sorta di odierno tabernacolo fotografia e video; il corpo è in questo caso quello mitico e archetipico di una divinità, apparizione numinosa di un' entità dai connotati sensuali, le fattezze chiamate in causa sono quelle immortali e sublimi della Dea Venere: la rappresentazione della sua genesi da una conchiglia, ispirata all'omonima opera di Botticelli, vuole celebrare l'armonia, la bellezza e l'amore, incarnati in questo caso in sembianze femminili. L'opera intende essere un quadro vivente ed è permeata da un aura di sacralità e da un senso devozionale nel suo passare dall'attuazione “rituale” dell'avvenimento della nascita (per mezzo di una azione teatrale, dove costumi e coreografie sono stati progettati e diretti dall'artista stessa), alla riproposizione differita e narrativa-evocativa dell'accadimento, attraverso un video del video: la proiezione del girato filmico della performance sul “fondale” di un busto plastico trasparente, esso stesso nuovo rimando alla raffigurazione scultorea della dea, viene a sua volta ripresa e costituisce la sequenza video a loop visibile nello schermo racchiuso tra le due ante; l'oggetto, ad infinitum, rimanda al soprannaturale evento.
La ricerca artistica di Sara Tirelli (1979, vive e lavora tra Venezia e Roma) si muove tra cinema, arte, nuove tecnologie e realtà virtuale, medium impiegati per esplorare processi percettivi e cognitivi, per indagare sulla plasmabilità del concetto di “reale”, sull'influenza del mezzo tecnologico, dei media e dell'informazione su memoria, storia individuale, collettiva e identità e sul rapporto tra l'immaginazione personale e il contemporaneo immaginario codificato. L'artista è interessata a studiare la fenomenologia dello sguardo, l'area indefinita di divario ed i legami tra ciò che è percepito e ciò che è effettivo, testando nuovi livelli di fruizione e modalità di rappresentazione e narrazione non convenzionali. Nell'opera video “Picnolepsy”, un personaggio è collocato in una dimensione spaziale resa ambigua da un contesto immersivo di visione anaglifica e di audio a 360 gradi : la stereoscopia falsata, per ottenere la quale l'attrice ha ripetuto due volte la stessa azione ed ogni “ciak” è stato ripreso da punti di vista leggermente sfasati tra loro, vuole porre in essere una fine riflessione sul confine che esiste tra verità e finzione, tra il reale, la sua conoscenza, influenzata da meccanismi appresi, ereditati, e la sua continua ricostruzione e modifica come proiezione verso il mondo esterno. Vari espedienti visivi e auditivi mirano a coinvolgere il fruitore in una circostanza sensoriale incerta, ma sono anche utilizzati per allargare l'ambientazione ad una situazione più estesa (suoni che raccontano la presenza di una seconda persona sul set, le sagome dell'attrice, che talvolta si disgiungono e sdoppiano, permettendoci così, attraverso lo svelamento del trucco di simulazione filmica, di vedere ciò che normalmente non sarebbe possibile). L'idea di corpo è analizzata qua nell'accezione di corpo messo in scena, raffigurato, con tutto il potenziale di una rilevazione che da tale rappresentazione è amplificata: è una lettura questa che si ribalta all'interno del corpo dello spettatore che guarda, che viene indagato a sua volta come sensore di strategie audio-visive sottilmente spiazzanti. Tutta la sequenza è costellata da indizi relativi alla decifrazione dell'ingannevolezza, dell'ambiguità, della lacunosità della comprensione del vero che si instaura sia per mezzo della sua riproposizione fictionale che tramite le dinamiche mentali e cognitive stesse: ciò a partire dal titolo, che si riferisce ad uno stato di brevi istanti di assenza della coscienza o alla sua invenzione da parte del soggetto, per proseguire poi con gli accenni suggeriti dai testi parlati, dalle azioni della protagonista, dalle immagini e dagli oggetti usati come tracce simboliche di questo puzzle.
Sara Tirelli - Breve Bio - C.V. >>>
Marilena Vita (1972, vive e lavora tra Siracusa e Milano) si avvale di differenti mezzi espressivi (pittura, installazione, fotografia, video arte, performance) con l'intento di portare all'esistenza nel mondo reale universi e condizioni incontrati nell'ambito privato dell'anima, nell'intimità della psiche, permettendo così a sé stessa e agli spettatori di confrontarsi con esperienze e contesti appartenenti ad un immaginario e ad una sfera emotiva universali. La dimensione del corpo in tutte le sue opere è vissuta in prima persona, nel mettere in scena azioni performative eseguite sempre esclusivamente una sola volta, e mai ripetute, o nell'entrare in situazioni dove è lei stessa ad agire come soggetto di autoscatti fotografici; nell'opera video “Non essendo è” il corpo è rappresentato attraverso il suo negativo, il nero totale di un ombra che non ha valenza di lato oscuro dell'inconscio, ma si ricollega alla luce, all'energia primigenia fonte di ogni forma di vita nell'universo. E' un nero fertile, vitale, creativo, scintilla di consapevolezza che dal fecondo “nulla” vibra un primo palpito, per iniziare un viaggio in direzione dell'auto-conoscenza, a sperimentare l'infinità delle sfaccettature del sé, che scaturiscono da un'unica matrice. Le scure presenze, le cui diverse personalità e disposizioni d'animo sono intuibili dalle varie silhouette, cadenze dei gesti e atteggiamenti, si muovono, senza incontrarsi, in un unico scenario, location immobile che pare esistere da un tempo indefinibile, legata a memorie assorbite da ogni esperienza che vi è stata trascorsa, luogo che rimanda all'idea di impermanenza e contemporaneamente ad una situazione a-temporale. La negazione della presenza diviene sagoma più potente e comunicativa che una sua rappresentazione ed è messaggera dell'assoluto originario alla ricerca della propria identità: è l'impossibile sguardo verso sé stessi che può restituirci solo lo specchio o l'occhio dell'altro, è l'alterità molteplice delle infinite possibilità dell'essere, la pluralità dell'unicità, che tutto contiene.
Testi di Sonia Arata, Amsterdam, Maggio 2018
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THE BODY LINK
PRIMA PARTE
Armida Gandini | Lory Ginedumont | Virginia Monteverde | Jean Sadao | Ellen Schippers | Sara Tirelli | Marilena Vita
Inaugurazione: 19 Maggio 2018– 17:00 / 21:00
Mostra: 19 Maggio - 16 Giugno 2018
Curatore: Sonia Arata
Partner dell'evento:
Radisson Blu Hotel, Amsterdam >>>
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Red Stamp Art Gallery
Rusland 22 - 1012 CL Amsterdam – NL
http://www.redstampartgallery.com/
Tel.: +31 20 4208684
Cell. NL: +31 6 46406531
Cell. IT: +39 347 1917003
RED STAMP ART GALLERY
presenteert
THE BODY LINK
EERSTE DEEL
ARMIDA GANDINI
LORY GINEDUMONT
VIRGINIA MONTEVERDE
JEAN SADAO
ELLEN SCHIPPERS
SARA TIRELLI
MARILENA VITA
VERNISSAGE: ZATERDAG 19 MEI 2018 – 17:00 / 21:00
TENTOONSTELLING: 19 MEI - 16 JUNI 2018
CURATOR: SONIA ARATA
ADRES: RUSLAND 22 – 1012 CL AMSTERDAM – NL Plattegrond >
Persbericht - Korte Versie - "The Body Link - Eerste Deel - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
Press Release - Extended Version - Artists and Artworks "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>.
Artists ans Artworks - "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
Flyer - "The Body Link - First Part - Red Stamp Art Gallery - Amsterdam" >>>
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Red Stamp Art Gallery is blij u THE BODY LINK I te mogen presenteren, het eerste deel van een tentoonstelling die, door middel van de persoonlijke gevoelens en lezingen van hedendaagse kunstenaars, een onderzoekende blik werpt op het brede en universele thema van het lichaam, fysieke band die het menselijk bewustzijn verbindt met de laag van de materie, met de zintuigen, met ons identiteitsbesef, met het ervaren van het leven en het in de wereld zijn, binnen de dimensie van ruimte en tijd.
De eerste fase van de expositie, die op zaterdag 19 mei van 17.00 tot 21.00 uur geopend wordt en tot en met 16 juni 2018 bezocht kan worden, toont de visie en inzichten over zeven internationale auteurs (uit Italië, Frankrijk, Japan en Nederland): Armida Gandini, Lory Ginedumont, Virginia Monteverde, Jean Sadao, Ellen Schippers, Sara Tirelli en Marilena Vita.
THE BODY LINK, gecureerd door Sonia Arata, suggereert, met een open titel, de predispositie en interesse om de meerdere mogelijke interpretatieve lezingen van elk van de gepresenteerde werken te verwelkomen: video- en fotokunstwerken, in het laatste geval altijd verbonden met een dynamische sequentie of een performatieve actie.
De tentoonstelling, die bestaat uit twee delen, krijgt in oktober 2018 een vervolg, waarbij het perspectief van een tweede groep kunstenaars gepresenteerd wordt.
Event partner: Radisson Blu Hotel, Amsterdam
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THE BODY LINK - FIRST PART
Artists and Artworks
Armida Gandini (1968, lives and works in Brescia, Italy) places at the center of her artistic investigation the individual and the theme of identity, sought in the relationship with the world: in many of her works an indefinite empty space, symbol of a mental field and interior theater, is the place where psychological vicissitudes are staged in various situations of confrontation with the outside and with the other. The body is read by the artist as a depiction of the personal identity which seeks self-knowledge, self-confidence, awareness and the confirmation of its own strength through the overcoming of difficulties and obstacles that life entails. In "Pregnant Silence", video work that combines film shots with drawn and animated images, the physique of the protagonist lies immersed in a dense, heavy and aqueous environment, an actual limbo that seems to isolate her from any interaction and make any move difficult, by holding her in suspense and dragging her at times into a sort of heavy sleep or oblivion: there is no communication with existence outside, which is perceived as a confused magma. The psyche of the person is confronted in this case with a condition of immobility and closure, in which the search for clarity is a difficult process and where more than ever the relationship with the outside is reversed in the difficult situation of a necessary face to face with oneself and one’s own uncertainties and fears, inside an oppressive state of claustrophobic isolation and inertia, but, as the title suggests, full of possibilities: the artist seems to portray in a contemporary and new way the figure of "melancholy" and of the slow and difficult crossing of this introspective and spiritual passage of "black humor", of an alchemical "nigredo", of a "spleen", indolence or malice of living, a territory of profound closeness of the soul with the dimension of emptiness, of lack, of the limit, of suffering, which needs to be crossed to get out of it reborn, enriched and renewed.
Lory Ginedumont (1964, lives and works between Italy and France) uses various means (photography, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, writing, painting, performance) to express the intimacy of her inner and emotional universe, under the ascendancy
of the intense lyric vibration that characterizes all of her works: for the artist the body and its representation are closely linked to one's personal experience, while the employed medium is chosen according to the potential of translating the message that she from time to time intends to transmit . The photographic sequence "J'ai pas envie d'etre un ange" and the homonymous video work related to it, (which is presented to the public for the first time at "The Body Link"
) sees the artist as protagonist, immersed in an action in which the angelic connotation of the wings is an emblem
of a psychological and spiritual condition from which she needs to strip herself from:
through the words of the autograph poem from which the two works originate, it's possible to understand the intensity of the desire to get rid of a feeling of immateriality that makes her feel inaccessible, the indefinite ubiquity proper to the celestial sphere, abstracted from the mundane, to fully live in the physical world, descending into a yearned corporeity, finally free from caging behavioral constraints. The body is in this case the personification of the material vehicle of the personality immersed in the plane of experiences and in the passage of time, which becomes a means of experimentation and knowledge, compared to the opposite psychic situation, symbolized by the angel, of ethereal purity, of keeping oneself out of existence to be everywhere, but from above, without ever really experiencing. Here is the text of the poem: “j'ai pas envie d'être un ange! plus envie d'ailes, de ciel,d'éternel. pas envie d'être invisible, inaccessible. plus envie d'être là ou là-bas, ici-bas. étrange envie de tomber des nues, sans jamais plus prendre mon envol.” ("I no longer want to be an angel, I no longer want wings, heaven, eternity, I no longer want to be invisible, inaccessible, I no longer want to be here and over here or there
, strange desire to fall from the clouds without ever resuming the flight. ").
Virginia Monteverde (1969, lives and works in Genova, Italy) directs her artistic choices towards digital mediums, by experimenting their peculiar expressive potential through video art, photography, multimedia installation and digital painting: in this fluid era of globalization, media communication and rapid technological changes, the artist adapts her expressive means to the current habits of use and reading of messages, with the intention to establish a direct and deep interaction with the viewer, starting from a level of a fine-tuned structuring to then reach a subsequent emotional one. Her works, characterized by essentiality, order and rationality of classical derivation, convey reflections on the individual and collective plots of a society in upheaval and radical mutation, of which the artist wants to transmit the new liquid perceptions. In the series "CodeLife, The Artists", the nudity of the body, the expression of the subjects, the surface of each person's epidermis are protagonist, in a gallery of half-bust figures where the portrait tradition is renewed into a contemporary version: added to the effigy of the person, captured in a given instant of time, in the here and now of the moment of the photo shoot, is the temporal dimension of the past, of the personal experience, of the story of each of the subjects, contained within the 30 seconds of a video of which the link to access is encoded in the QRCode that everyone exposes "tattooed" on the chest, at the height of heart, as a numerical seal to decipher, able to enclose a plurality of data, in this case the same ones deposited, marked and layered on the skin of each individual, as a kind of not immediately accessible writing, traced by the passing of years and experiences. The fast flow of moments of life from childhood to the instant of the pose in front of the artist who portrays them "lays bare" the six artists and offers thirty impressions of insight almost "stolen" from the intimate memory of each; every shot in turn seems to take on the value of a new code that mysteriously then generates the following temporal fragment, as a sort of "Chinese boxes" configuration in the inscrutable unknown of the unravelling of existence. The speed of the frames in the video creates a parallel both with the extreme rapidity of information diffusion in the modern world and with the suddenness of the associations of the mind; the gaze is key and leads to the unfathomable abyss of the individual, a precious vital cipher that is transmitted to us in this "trailer" of the life of each of the protagonists.
Virginia Monteverde - C.V. >>>
Jean Sadao (1976, lives and works in Tokyo, Japan) expresses himself through an artistic production that combines cinema, theater, performance and video art. At the center of his research there is the investigation about the identity in connection with today's society, in which the individual must relate, face and adapt to ever faster transformations. In a globalized scenario the artist observes with particular attention the nodal point of the connection between our original natural surroundings and the current urbanized and technological ones , also read as the relationship between tradition and past, present and future, between East and West, in a perspective that in a certain way abstracts itself from the immediate, through a broad, overall vision, from above, sometimes employing surreal and symbolic images or compositions that can be read as a sort of visual alphabet. This is the case of "The Multi-sensory Impossibility of a Worm", which will have its première at the “The Body Link”; the work raises questions about the body, the sensorial potentialities and their limits, and establishes the hypothesis of an unusual tactile and bodily language as a means of communication able to approach universality and naturalness, by questioning its possible implications in terms of influence on the person and on the community. The artist looks at physicality in the possible expansion of sensoriality and reflects on the way in which methods of communication necessarily influence the formation of the structure of the self, culture and lifestyle. The stratification of semantic levels, the perceptual displacement in decoding the sequences of the nine squares in which the artist breaks up the screen area, force the viewer to engage in an unusual mode of reading, for which he is not yet trained, in order to coordinate the multiple visual and auditory impulses, including the codes of the silent sign language and the meaning of the action of the protagonists, who seem to test each other, looking for an alternative contact and unconventional forms of interaction and knowledge.
Ellen Schippers (lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands), uses performances, sculptural dresses, installations, video and photographic works to explore the concept of body understood as an expression of the subtle part of the person, of the interiority and of the psychic essence, whit the purpose to show their rarefied nuances and tensions, from the inside of one temporal and spatial dimension in suspense ; the artist aims, through a hypnotic and emotional involvement that's put into effect through multiple expressive strategies, for a cathartic and decisive reaction, which can lead to the recovery of the integrity of the soul beyond the stereotypes and pre-packaged structures imposed by the pressures of society on the authenticity and uniqueness of the individual. "The Birth of Venus" belongs to a series of triptych-works that compositionally derive from the traditional three-panel framework and incorporate photography and video into a sort of today's tabernacle; the body is in this case the mythical and archetypical one of a divinity, numinous appearance of an entity with sensual connotations, the features called into question are the immortal and sublime ones of the Goddess Venus: the representation of her genesis from a shell, inspired by the homonymous work by Botticelli, wants to celebrate harmony, beauty and love, embodied in this case in a feminine guise. The work intends to be a living picture and is permeated by an aura of sacredness and a devotional sense in its passage from the "ritual" enacting of the birth event (by means of a theatrical action, costumes and choreography for which were designed and directed by the artist herself), to the deferred and narrative-evocative repetition of the occurrence through a video of the video: the projection of the filmed performance on the "backdrop" of a transparent plastic bust, itself a new cross-reference to the sculptural representation of the goddess, gets in turn recorded and constitutes the video loop sequence visible on the screen enclosed between the two doors; the object, ad infinitum, refers to the supernatural event.
The artistic research of Sara Tirelli (1979, lives and works between Venice and Rome, Italy) moves between cinema, art, new technologies and virtual reality, mediums which are used to explore perceptive and cognitive processes, to investigate the malleability of the concept of "real", the influence of technological means, of media and information on memory, individual and collective history and identity and on the relationship between personal imagination and the contemporary codified imaginary. The artist is interested in studying the phenomenology of the gaze, the undefined area of the gap and the links between what is perceived and what is actual , testing new levels of fruition and unconventional modes of representation and narration. In the video work "Picnolepsy", a character is placed in a spatial dimension that's made ambiguous by an immersive context of anaglyphic vision and 360-degrees audio: the distorted stereoscopy, arising from the repetition of the same action and from the filming of the two shots from slightly out of sync points of view, is meant to put into practice an acute reflection on the boundary between truth and fiction, between the real, its knowledge, that's influenced by learned, inherited mechanisms, and its continuous reconstruction and modification as a projection towards the outside world. Various visual and auditory expedients aim to involve the viewer in an uncertain sensorial circumstance, but they are also used to enlarge the setting to a wider situation (sounds which tell the presence of a second person on the scene, the two silhouettes of the actress, which sometimes separate and split, thus allowing us, through the unveiling of the the trick of film simulation, to see what would not be normally possible). The idea of the body is analyzed here in a meaning of staged, depicted body, together with the whole potential of a recognition that's amplified by such a representation: it is a reading that's reversed within the body of the spectator who watches, which is investigated in turn as a sensor of subtly unsettling audio-visual strategies. The whole sequence is dotted with clues concerning the deciphering of deceptiveness, of ambiguity, of the gappiness of the understanding of the truth that can occur both through its fictional re-proposition and through the mental and cognitive dynamics themselves: starting from the title, which refers to a state of brief moments of absence of consciousness or to its invention by the subject, to then continue with the hints suggested by the spoken texts, the actions of the protagonist, the images and the objects used as symbolic traces of this puzzle.
Sara Tirelli - Short Bio - C.V.>>>
Marilena Vita (1972, lives and works between Syracuse and Milan, Italy) uses different means of expression (painting, installation, photography, video art, performance) with the aim of bringing into the existence in the real world universes and conditions that she encountered in the private sphere of the soul, in the intimacy of the psyche, thereby allowing herself and the spectators to be confronted with experiences and contexts belonging to a universal imagery and emotional sphere. The bodily dimension in all of her works is experienced in first person, in staging performative actions which are executed always only once and never repeated, or in entering into situations where she herself acts as the subject of photographic self-portraits; in the video work "Non essendo è (“In not being it is”) the body is represented through its negative, the total black of a shadow that does not have the value of the dark side of the unconscious, but is connected to light, to the primordial energy source of every form of life in the universe. It is a fertile black, a vital, creative one, sparkle of awareness that from the fruitful "nothing" vibrates a first beat, to start a journey in the direction of self-knowledge, to experience the infinity of the facets of the self, which spring from a unique matrix. The dark presences, whose various personalities and dispositions of mind can be guessed from their various silhouettes, cadences of gestures and attitudes, move, without meeting, in a single scenario, motionless location that seems to exist from an indefinable time, linked to absorbed memories from every experience that has been lived there, a place that refers to the idea of impermanence and simultaneously to an a-temporal situation. The denial of the presence becomes a more powerful and communicative form than a representation of it and is the messenger of the original absolute in search of its identity: it is the impossible glance towards oneself that only a mirror or the eye of others can give us back, it is the multiple alterity of the infinite possibilities of being, the plurality of uniqueness, which contains everything.
Teksten: Sonia Arata, Amsterdam, Mei 2018
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THE BODY LINK
EERSTE DEEL
Armida Gandini | Lory Ginedumont | Virginia Monteverde | Jean Sadao | Ellen Schippers | Sara Tirelli | Marilena Vita
Vernissage: 19 Mei 2018 – 17:00 / 21:00
Tentoonstelling: 19 Mei - 16 Juni 2018
Curator: Sonia Arata
Event partner:
Radisson Blu Hotel, Amsterdam >>>
***
Red Stamp Art Gallery
Rusland 22 - 1012 CL Amsterdam – NL
http://www.redstampartgallery.com/
Tel.: +31 20 4208684
Mob. NL: +31 6 46406531
Mob. IT: +39 347 1917003
Ellen Schippers, "The Birth of Venus"Tryptich, ChromaLuxe on aluminium, video sequence on screen, 2012, cm. 40 x 32,5 (closed)/ 82 x 32,5 (open)
...RED STAMP ART GALLERY ...CONTEMPORARY ART ...AMSTERDAM
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