2022 Projects at the fair

Arte Fiera 2022 will offer rich and inclusive contents with some of the most interesting names on the contemporary Italian art scene. The public programme ranges among expressive genres and offers professionals and the general public a close-up look at the state of art in Italy.

In every edition since 2019 – the first year of Simone Menegoi’s mandate as artistic director – Arte Fiera has commissioned a well-known Italian artist to create a new, large-scale work to be presented to the public at the fair. The artist invited to Arte Fiera 2022 (following Flavio Favelli, Eva Marisaldi, and Stefano Arienti) is Liliana Moro (b. Milan, 1961). One of the most original Italian artists since the late 1980s, Moro is not easily classified: although she works with recurring subjects, expressive formulas and materials – from references to games to scale models, up to her recent ceramics – her 30 years of work resists all attempts at pigeon-holing, challenging viewers to face her works without prejudice.

To carry out her commission, Moro has chosen an unusual material that she has employed regularly since the late ’90s: sound. Focussing on a section of the path that connects the North Entrance to the halls of Arte Fiera – three long corridors with moving walkways that are commonly found in airports and metros - Moro has conceived a sort of large sound sculpture, elaborated with her own voice, that visitors will experience as they move to and from the halls.

Oplà. Performing Activities, now in its third edition, is curated by Silvia Fanti (Xing), recognised internationally for her interdisciplinary look at contemporary cultures, with special attention to live arts, an expressive form that has characterised Bologna’s artistic scene since the 70s.

There are four activities on the programme, by Italian artists (by birth or adoption).

• Jacopo Benassi (b. 1970), photographer, artist, and performer, known for the rawness of his style, proposes Unisex, an activity in an unexpected space: the bathrooms in the fair’s Infopoint area. The artist will welcome guests in the common rooms of the bathrooms according to a new and inclusive exhibition practice based on live shooting. 
   
• Invernomuto (Simone Bertuzzi, b. 1983, and Simone Trabucchi, b. 1982), presents Vernascacadabra, an intangible radio performance that adds a new piece to the linguistic and subculture research that characterises their work. The activity takes place on the loudspeaker system in the halls, from which Invernomuto will transmit a series of works for ocarina, announced and played throughout the day.
   
• Muna Mussie (b. 1970), an Eritrean artist based in Bologna, presents Persona, an encounter between the artist and visitors, mediated by sewing: Mussie challenges visitors to have their worst defect embroidered on an article of their clothing.  
   
• Luca Trevisani (b. 1979) presents his new Ai piedi del pane, at the crossroads of performing activity and metaphoric/organic sculpture: works to wear, shoes with soles of bread grafted onto existing uppers, bas reliefs to take for a walk around Arte Fiera. An act of cultural archaeology that employs irony to challenge our hierarchy of material values.

The Talk section is a very important part of the public programme. In 2022, it will be renamed Book Talk and will focus exclusively on the presentation of recently-published books.

There will be many daily presentations throughout the three days of the fair. Here are a few highlights (the day-by-day programme will soon be available on www.artefiera.it ).

• Liliana Moro, artist invited by Arte Fiera for the 2022 edition, presents the book Ascolto (Di Paolo Edizioni) in dialogue with the book’s curator Cecilia Casorati and gallerist Mario Pieroni. The book, published in 2021, focusses exclusively on the artist’s work with sound.
   
• Gianfranco Maraniello, curator (with Alberto Salvadori and Vincenzo Trione) of the book Aria Italiana (Mousse Publishing, 2021) on the current art scene in Italy, introduces the book along with Massimo Kaufmann, one of the artists included, engaging in a game of chess on a multicoloured work/chessboard created by Kaufmann. This is the first public presentation of Aria Italiana, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
   
• Marco Meneguzzo, curator of the Focus section, which is dedicated this year to the rational approaches to artistic creation from the ’50s to the ’70s, moderates a talk on the past, present, and possible future of kinetic and programmed art with Domenico Quaranta and Valentino Catricalà (authors of Sopravvivenza programmata. Etiche e pratiche di conservazione, dall’arte cinetica alla Net Art, Edizioni Kappabit, 2020), and Lucilla Meloni (author of Le ragioni del gruppo. Un percorso tra gruppi, collettivi, sigle, comunità nell'arte in Italia dal 1945 al 2000, Postmediabooks, 2020).
   
• Laura Cherubini, curator of Focus in 2020, will talk with Andrea Viliani, Director of Museo delle Civiltà of Rome, about his book Controcorrente. I grandi solitari dell'arte italiana. Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis, Luciano Fabro, Fabio Mauri, Vettor Pisani, Marisa Merz (Marinotti, 2020).

BPER Banca is the sponsor and partner for the guided tours and the book talk programme.

Arte Fiera 2022 is delighted to host Note di Sguardi as part of its public programme. Note di Sguardi is a photography project involving three districts of three European cities: the centre of Cervia, Santo Stefano in Bologna, and Pankow in Berlin. 36 posters created by 36 international artists, working in these three cities or in neighbouring areas, will be exhibited in the public space. Each artist was asked to select an image from their photographic archive. Every month, for a year, three posters by three different artists will be exhibited together simultaneously in the three cities.

The project was conceived by Giovanna Sarti (artist and curator) and created in collaboration with Gino Gianuizzi, Eva Scharrer (in the 1^st edition), and Sara Bernshausen (in the 2^nd). At Arte Fiera, the public may view all of the posters created so far, displayed in the passageway that links the two Halls.