ART CITY Bologna
The tenth ART CITY Bologna takes piace from 7-15 May 2022 . This cultura! alliance project results from the partnership between the Municipality of Bologna and BolognaFiere to support the annual Arte Fiera and offer an originai exploration of the city's museums and art venues.
After the decision to postpone the traditional end-of-January edition of ltaly's longest-running art fair to the spring season due to the pandemie, ART CITY Bologna has bolstered the collaborative spirit established with the fair, moving to May for the second consecutive year after the well-received experimental version organized in 2021 .
Coordinated by the Istituzione Bologna Musei's Modem and Contemporary Art Area under the artistic direction of Lorenzo Balbi, the program offers a rich calendar of openings and extraordinary opportunities beginning Saturday, 7 May, and continuing until the following weekend, in conjunction with Arte Fiera, scheduled for 13-15 May 2022.
The core features a Main Program divided into a special project and a series of curatorial projects from among the most diverse contemporary works of art. The calendar also offers invitations from museums, foundations, institutional venues, Associazione Gallerie Bologna-Confcommercio Ascom Bologna, exhibition settings, and independent galleries in the city.
ART CITY Bologna 2022 starts from a necessary redefinition of the ways of sharing public space and from an observation of the changing dynamics of interpersonal relationships in a context that continues to be shaped by the results of the pandemie crisis and which must inevitably deal with the conflict in Ukraine. The works extend into actions , exhibitions, and site-specific installations that inhabit customary and unusual locations, generating narratives and new interactions.
Partners
ART CITY Bologna 2022 would like to thank the following for their support: Gruppo Hera, Gruppo Unipol, CUBO Museo d'impresa del Gruppo Unipol, Associazione Gallerie Bologna - Confcommercio Ascom Bologna .
Places
One of ART CITY Bologna's most distinctive features has always been the intention to bring places not often dedicated to art to the attention of a large audience-among the most interesting, unknown, or rarely accessible in the city-rediscovered through works by the artists invited to document their specific identities.
This year the contexts of action again range among the most diverse typologies: from the incomparable locations in the city symbolic of its history (e.g., Piazza Maggiore, Palazzo d'Accursio, and the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna) to the eminent palaces that are now cultura! venues (e.g., Palazzo De' Toschi with the Banca di Bologna's conference room, Alchemilla in Palazzo Vizzani, the Oratorio di San Filippo Neri owned by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, Palazzo Bentivoglio and the Musical Research Center Teatro San Leonardo, priceless architectural treasures (e.g., the Padiglione de l'Esprit Nouveau designed by Le Corbusier), and lastly, the leafy setting of the Orto Botanico ed Erbario located in the heart of the University Museum System.
The 2022 event is also characterized by a broader, polycentric dimension that extends the extensive constellation of events towards Bologna's metropolitan area to include Calderara di Reno, Pianoro, Pieve di Cento, Riola di Vergato, San Giorgio di Piano, San Lazzaro di Savena, San Pietro in Casale, Valsamoggia as well as the Municipality of Cento in the province of Ferrara.
Visual identity
Like in 2021, the conception and development of this year's visual identity were entrusted to the artists Filippo Tappi and Marco Casella. Starting with Peter Pan, last year's star and visitors' guide, this year's star is an astronomica! phenomenon of a body that quakes, fades, and increases. Bologna is the background for the 2022 event-a galaxy where everything happens: an agglomerate of iridescent planets, pulsating stars, dark matter, and dust, which dance undisturbed to the cosmic rhythm. In this nebula, myriad events make contact, overlap, merge, echo, and multiply. The city's sounds, its streets, arcades, hills, and people that experience it form the background noise of a galaxy that , during ART CITY, is crisscrossed by unidentified objects, anomalous glows, atomic worlds that appear and disappear, unheard-of sounds, rhythms, and signals that traverse the city for some hours to then disappear.
The star has been reinterpreted in various shapes and colors that change in frequency, accompanying an explosion, an evanescent glow, an engine for change. A living, organic being thus follows that reaffirms the variety in the world of signs, a being with softer lines bringing with it the muffled sounds of the sea.
The last element of visual identity is the trajectory of a journey at light speed, where signs begin to multiply and blend into the background.
The artistic idea of the Main Program
Since the 2018 event, ART CITY Bologna's special project has been to invite the public to experience veritable living works of art. Thus, they continue this ambitious adventure in producing and presenting works by the most thought-provoking and significant international artists, invited to imagine works for Bologna's most iconic locations.
Tino Sehgal, one of the most radical artists in recent years, was invited to the 2022 event. He won the Leone d'Oro at the Venice lnternational Art Exhibition in 2013. His works are authentic living sculptures, choreographies of people in motion that generate unusual, sometimes surreal situations that provoke the public. Lorenzo Balbi has curated the work, which is promoted by Istituzione Bologna Musei I MAMbo with the support of the Unipol Group and in collaboration with Bologna Welcome. The artist conceived and designed the work specifically for Piazza Maggiore-for centuries, a public piace for doing business surrounded by medieval buildings and the imposing Basilica of San Petronio. Forty-five dancers and performers participate as Sehgal uses their bodies and gestures for artistic and human materiai to compose a large work, a unique opportunity to experience art in terms of a social experience of mutuai exchange.
Engaging with the curator, the artist meets the public in an event promoted by the CUBO Museo d'impresa del Gruppo Unipol on Sunday, 15 May, at 5 pm at the Unipol Enea Mazzoli Auditorium.
Nine main projects have been curated, produced, and created specifically for the event and built with regard to the places hosting them. Up-and-coming artists like Benni Bosetto, Kipras Dubauskas, Mattia Pajè, and Emilia Tapprest are joined by the more established Andreas Angelidakis, Giulia Niccolai (the only non-living artist), and Italo Zuffi, plus international names like Carlos Garaicoa, Pedro Neves Marques, and the previously mentioned Tino Sehgal. The attention to ltalian art, chosen by Arte Fiera's artistic director Simone Menegoi, is accompanied by cross-fertilization and openness of artists worldwide. One defining element that cuts across the projects in this tenth event is the experiential aspect prevalent in the work, where action uses bodies to redefine space. lf this is evident in Tino Sehgal's Special Project, it is no less meaningful for several other projects, starting with Stultifera. This great performative work by Senni Bosetto and curated by Caterina Molteni takes piace in the Salone degli Incamminati of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. lnspired by Sebastian Brant's satirical work The Ship of Fools (1494), the scene takes place on a ship destined to journey endlessly; its passengers interact by assuming archetypal identities in their need to define a new social order. Stultifera is a project funded by the Trust for Contemporary Art with the support of MAMbo, the National Art Gallery of Bologna, Palaexpo Special Company-il Mattatoio I Prender-si Cura project, in collaboration with Ateliersi. The experiential element returns in the exhibition dedicated to Giulia Niccolai, Perché lo faccio perché. Giulia Niccolai's La vita poetica is on display at the Padiglione de l'Esprit Nouveau. It was curated by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Caterina Molteni and promoted by MAMbo. Here, the artist's poetic, visual, and audio research has been reconstructed and reactivated thanks to a performance by Giulia Crispiani, a writing and reading workshop with Allison Grimaldi Donahue, a video interview by Bes Bajraktarevié, and a film project by Sergio Racanati and Manuela Gandini. The performative element is also found in Emilia Tapprest's Zhouwéi Network, in collaboration with Victor Evink, at the Musical Research Center-Teatro San Leonardo. The immersive video installation and live performance curated by Felice Moramarco explore the relationship between dating, politica! power, and individuai affective experiences through the medium of cinema. It has been promoted by the Embassy and Consulate Generai of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1- Portunus, the Mondriaan Fund, and Stimuleringsfonds, in collaboration with DEMO Moving lmage Experimental Politics, Adiacenze, and AngelicA I Music Research Center. A peculiar trait of Italo Zuffi's Fronte e retro is his exploration of experiencing a space through actions to redefine it and create narratives. This persona! exhibition is divided between two locations curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Davide Ferri and promoted by MAMbo and the Banca di Bologna. MAMbo's Sala delle Ciminiere offers a retrospective tour of the mid-1990s to 2020. Meanwhile, a new series of productions can be seen in the Banca di Bologna's conference room in Palazzo De' Toschi.
Since it first started in 2013, one other cornerstone of ART CITY's identity is how the works dialogue with the urban and architectural spaces, which emerges in other Main Program projects.
Presented at Palazzo Bentivoglio, Andreas Angelidakis's project POST-RUIN Bentivoglio, curateci by Antonio Grulli, belongs to this approach. The large installation that gives the exhibition its title is at its center. It spans the three rooms in the building's 161h-century basement, referring to its past and an earlier building of the Bolognese family destroyed in a popular uprising. The work is part of a series in which the concept of ruin is subverted, making it usable in the way the public wants it.
Emergency Break by Kipras Dubauskas is set up in the centrally locateci Sala Tassinari in Palazzo D'Accursio, managed by the Fondazione per l'Innovazione Urbana. Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi curated this film installation. It is being promoted by NOS Visual Arts Production in collaboration with Home Movies, the Lithuanian lnstitute of Culture, and the Sandra Natali Artist's Residence. For the first time in ltaly, the project presents a trilogy dedicateci to "rescue", a very up-to-date theme, which the Lithuanian artist began developing in 2019, with a preview of the chapter on Bologna.
In contrast, Carlos Garaicoa is the protagonist of the interaction with the 18th-century space of the Oratorio di San Filippo Neri, a quite popular piace with the public. His installation was curateci by Maura Pezzati and is being promoted by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna in collaboration with Galleria Continua. The Cuban artist approaches this place's history by recalling its destruction during the Second World War and the restoration that facilitateci the recovery of a Bolognese Baroque architectural masterpiece . The video installation Aedes Aegypti by the artist, writer, and director Pedro Neves Marques was curateci by Sabrina Samorì and promoted by MAMbo in collaboration with SMA-University Museum System. Its singular location creates a dynamic relationship with the hosting space, the University of Bologna's Botanica! Garden and Herbarium. lts hyper realistic digitai animation highlights the artificiality of the female mosquito Aedes Aegypti, which carries the Zika and Dengue viruses. Scientists have developed a weapon that interferes with this insect's reproductive systems in their ongoing quest to contrai, regulate, and dominate nature. Male mosquitoes are injected with a "lethal gene", which transforms the reproductive act of impregnation into one of random sterilization. Expanding the idea of contagiousness in the pre-pandemic era, Neves Marques has used the example of Aedes Aegypti to refer to bodily suppression in the service of national and economie interests.
Mattia Pajè's exhibition Fuori Terra inhabits Palazzo Vizzani's historical rooms, centered on a sculptural group of humanoid figures immersed in an installation environment. It was curateci by Giovanni Rendina, promoted by MAMbo and Alchemilla in collaboration with Associazione BOGA and Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio.
To become better acquainted with the poetics and practices of some of the Main Project artists, Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna will present the ARTALK CITY series, hosting encounters with the Main Program artists. Discussions will be held between artists, curators, and teaching staff. Open to the public, 11-15 May at 10:30 am in the auditorium.
In conjunction with the Main Program, the presence of a widespread, interconnected cultural system is fundamental to reconfirm contemporary Bologna's identity as a productive workshop of artistic events, with programming coordinateci by museums, foundations, and public and private institutional spaces where the creativity of the present mirrors a multi faceted range of approaches.
This week, the other leading player is the Associazione Gallerie Bologna - Confcommercio Ascom Bologna. Exhibitions range from the great ltalian figurative art of the twentieth century to first-rate international artists, plus artists from our area.
This jam-packed program ensures no shortage of exhibitions and other initiatives locateci in the most diverse types of exhibition spaces and independent galleries. Each year, they energize Bologna, transforming the city into a theater of a wide range of contemporary experiences.
ART CITY White Night
Art lovers who wish to expand their orbit into myriad initiatives and spaces can focus on the evening of Saturday, 14 May, when ART CITY White Night returns, and contemporary art peacefully invades the city with exhibitions, performances, and other events held in public, private, and commerciai areas.
The White Night has been organized by BolognaFiere as part of ART CITY Bologna 2022 and in collaboration with merchants and cultura! players in Bologna.
The public. Access information
To ensure the safe participation of workers and visitors, the return to sharing art and culture in person complies fully with the safety rules and health protection protocols in force for the length of the exhibition. In terms of promoting accessibility, free access to all events included in the Main Program remains confirmed
Always consult artcity.bologna.it for the most up-to-date information on how to enter the exhibition venues.
The guide and other tools to help you find your way around the program
Program information is presented in two different editoria! formats, with the visual design edited by Filippo Tappi and Marco Casella. lt is always available to accompany you on your persona! journey during the event and keep at the end.
The guide booklet, edited by Lorenzo Balbi, Caterina Molteni, and Sabrina Samorì, contains texts by curators and descriptions of the places on the Main Program in a bilingual ltalian/English version . Copies are available in the offices of the relateci projects.
In order to find your way around all the programmed events, a map is available in ltalian at all of the ART CITY Bologna 2022 locations, in the Bologna Welcome information and tourist reception points, and in the Arte Fiera pavilions.