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Otolith Group is a duo of artists who live in London and that, since 2000, they’ve been working on the cross between imagination and the real world, between the fictionalization of reality and the realisation of fiction. The members, Anjailika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, chose this important conceptual focus because, according to them, there’s a lack of imagination in today’s world, as well as a lack of storytelling, and these deficiencies are some of the main reasons which are stopping the elaboration of possible alternatives to the order which surrounds us, which is perceived more and more all the time as wrong and unbalanced.

Precisely, balance is one of the aspects which is the base of the project: Otolith Group takes its name from the ‘otoliths’, which are crystals which are found in the vestibular system of many organisms and which allows it to find out the weight and direction of gravity. The otoliths are extremely important for the orientation of the human being in a space with gravity, like the Earth.

One of the most interesting studies carried out by this group is the ‘microgravity’ one. Anjalika and Kodwo imagined the consequences of an entire generation of human beings born in microgravity conditions (which is the closest you can get to the lack of gravity, which doesn’t exist in universal space). It’s about, evidently, pretexts for a metaphorical thought on today’s world, and its approaches always pay careful attention to the international political situation (to which they’re both very aware of).

One of the most interesting videos on the work of fiction and reality is ‘Hydra Decapita’. Here, the duo postulates the possibility of a new human race born under the ocean of slaves who have died in its waters during the crossings. The whole video plays with a visual ambiguity between the light game which the water creates when you take away its intermediate shades (leaving only a movement of blacks and whites) and a possible alphabet through which the ocean’s inhabitants would communicate with.

You can find more information in the official website: http://www.otolithgroup.org/

The subtitle of the exhibition ‘The Mode of Thought’, makes reference to a book published in 1901 by Charles W. Leadbeater and the feminist and socialist activist Annie Wood Besant. In this text, the authors think about nature and the power of thought.

The exhibition will open its doors on October 7th and it can be visited until February 5th at the MAXXI Museum in Rome (located on Via Guido Reni, 4A).

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If you don’t know this original project, we recommend you rent apartments in Rome and take the chance to the discover the vibrant artistic and cultural world of the Italian city.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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Until the 29th of January of 2012, the MAXXI Contemporary Art Museum in Rome holds the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’, a collective and itinerant review which shows is the Indian contemporary art scene. The exhibition is commissioned by Julia Ferracci, art director of the MAXXI, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Julia Peyton-Jones.

The MAXXI Museum carries out the first exhibition in Italy on the current art scene in India, understanding that, today, it’s an area which is going through important economic and social transformations which are reflected in aesthetic representation. To carry out this interesting exhibition, the museum had the collaboration of Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Modern Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Today, Indian art is breaking onto the global scene and it’s considered as one of the most interesting one amongst the emerging countries, at least so say the critics, who see in as a new trend which receives its boost from the great changes that the country is going through. However, from those big transformations that are observed from the crisis of the Western model, few talk about the millions of human beings who live in poverty and misery. That’s why the outlook of the contemporary artists from that part of the world give to this invisible economic success in India.

The walk through this exhibition establishes an interesting sequence which brings us to cultural polysemy among the different artists chosen for this exhibition, where meanings and references generate a space for thinking for the spectator.

The dialectics between modernity and tradition, characteristic from times of transformations and modernization, is something which art picks up with wonderful sensitiveness, especially which this is reflected in different trends and styles. With the new generation of artists not being shaped by the post-colonial inheritance, they manifest their acceptance to Western art in a much more relaxed way, seizing the post-medial condition which contemporary art has validated.

One of the artists who will be present in this exhibition and who represents this new generation of the artistic scene in India is Jitish Kallat, born in Mumbai in 1974. His work has travelled the world and has as a concept the cry of disappointment of one of the cultural transformations who have broken the charm of society and the values inherited by great social fighters like Gandhi. His work is produced in large formats and he uses different supports, such as paintings, sculptures and exhibitions.

Like many say, art is product of its time, and this exhibition definitely shows it. From there that it’s interesting to see different minimal conceptual art expressions which tell us about a new India, where the post-colonial component seems to have disappeared from the horizon.

For more information: http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/

Nancy Guzman

Indian Highway is a great input into Indian contemporary culture, which invites us to walk through a society of contradictions. So, if you’d thought of renting apartments in Rome for a few days, come a soak yourself in culture at the MAXXI Museum.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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With the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ a new thinking cycle opens regarding the intense artistic production of one of the largest countries in Asia, and whose culture has strongly influenced Western sensitivity in the last few decades: India.

The exhibition presents a collective itinerary that, through a vast selection of works of various supports, presents the multiform panorama of the typical Indian artistic scene. That way, in the first exhibition that an Italian museum dedicates to India, they offer the opportunity of coming closer to the culture of the country through its visual and artistic investigation. The intention of the exhibition, as well, is to reflect the economic, social and cultural development of the last twenty years, from the 90s, which has taken India to be recognised as a place of global centrality also in the art world.

With the decision of inserting the title of the exhibition on the motorways, they’re making reference clearly to one of those ‘fluxes’ analyzed by the Indian anthropologist Appadurai, namely the massive translations from the countryside and the peripheries to the cities, more and more populated all the time, and to the strong interconnection managed by land between one area and another of the giant country.

Among the curators there is Julia Peyton-Jones, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and the famous Swiss commissioner and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, who currently is the co-director of exhibitions and the director of international projects of the Serpentine Gallery of London. His work became well-known thanks to the vast project ‘Interview Project’, in which he converses with different celebrities from the world of art with the idea of reconstructing a path or a panorama at this moment where all the confines between what is art and what isn’t seemed to have become completely blurred. The idea of this project came to his head when, while still a student, he read two conversations that changed his life and made him take up art completely: one of Francis Bacon with David Sylvester and the other of Marcel Duchamp with Pierre Cabanne. Until today, he accounts for over 2000 hours of interviews, and he refers to his archive as a ‘never-ending conversation’. These conversations that were published in the Artforum Magazine from 1996, have 69 artists, architects, writers, scientists, musicians and philosophers.

Ulrich Obrist, fascinated by India, proposes today ‘Indian Highway’ as a moment to think about art from the observation of the development of one country.

The exhibition opens its doors on Wednesday 21st of September at 7m, and it can be visited until the 29th of January 2012, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays from 11am until 7pm, and Thursdays and Saturdays from 11am until 10pm. The entry with full tariff is 11 euros, 8 euros with reduced tariff (for children, OAPs and students who present a student card).

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If you’re interested in art, we recommend that you rent apartments in Rome and come to enjoy a stay in the beautiful Italian capital, taking advantage of getting to know the artistic scene of India.

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Translated by: aleixgwilliam
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Museum MAXXI, the most important museum for contemporary art in Rome, exhibits a retrospective of one of the well-known Italian artists: Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The exhibition features over 100 works from Italian and American, public and private collections. This extraordinary exhibition shows Pistoletto´s professional development since 1956 until 1974, in a retrospective that promises to define the personality and sensibility of one of the founding artists of the famous Italian movement called “Arte Povera”.

This movement, which became known in the late ’60s, was an accurate critique of the commercialization of art, and tried to escape from the “market” by using materials considered as “poor” (wood, leaves, crystals, plants, coal and clay), as well as requiring the intervention of the public to be alive. The idea, still very strong in Pistoletto´s work, led to significant reflection on art and its meaning through the observation of materials handled and readily available.

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He made his first artistic works at the age of 14, when he worked with his father restoring art, and then as an apprentice of Armando Testa, famous founder of the most important school of graphics at that time. In 1950, Pistoletto began exhibiting in collective exhibitions. He had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Galatea in Turin in 1960. In 2003 he won the “Leone d’Oro” at the Venice Biennale for his artistic career and Turin University conferred an honorary degree in Political Science. He is currently the artistic director of “Event”, a festival of urban development that takes place in Bordeaux.

The exhibition “From one to many”, that will remain at museum MAXXI until the 15^th of August, explores Pistoletto´s artistic career from his rigorous self-investigation and representation of his identity, to the most recent artistic collaborations with other great artists. The works are divided into three main groups: Reflective surfaces and plexiglass, the “Oggetti in meno” (less important objects) and “Stracci” (Rags), as well as the series “Light and reflections.” A separate space is reserved for the actions and performances of the theater group “The Zoo”, which hosts video objects and records of their works.

The exhibition aims to fully reconstruct the work of an Italian artist in the difficult context of the transformations that changed the country during the postwar period, exploring his relationship with art movements such as Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism and, in a particular way, emphasizing the collaborative aspect of Pistoletto´s work from the second half of the ’50s. For more information please visit the web www.fondazionemaxxi.it

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If you are passionate about art and do not want to miss this interesting exhibition at the MAXXI, do not miss the chance to rent apartments in Rome while enjoying a cultural stay in the Italian capital.

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Translated by: Hans
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The 4th of March will see the opening of exhibition “Michelangelo Pistoletto: from one to many, 1956-1974” at the MAXXI, in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show, which is on until the 15th of August, consists of more than 100 of Pistoletto’s works from American and European private collections.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, the son of a picture frame restorer, was born in Biella, Italy in 1933. His involvement in Turin’s post-war art movement shaped his artistic approach, basing it in the preoccupation with politics and social inequalities,

If Pistoletto’s early work connected to the Pop Art movement, he soon moved his attentions to Arte Povera, and art critic Germano Celant, who was the spokesman for the movement of the late 1960s, which rejected the concept of art as a commodity, and used cheap, accessible materials to convey its message. The intention of Arte Povera was to draw the spectator into the art space, and into the socio-political critique of the artwork.

An early example of this in Pistoletto’s work was the series “Minor objects,” which used raw, minimalist objects and cheap materials in order to reject the idea of art as commercial. This approach was seen as a way of liberating the concept of art, and rejecting the individualism of the artist – an attitude which paralleled with the revolutionary Socialism of the 1960s.

Leaving Arte Povera behind, Pistoletto went in search of new forms of expression, and new ways of challenging stereotypes and social convention, experimenting with new mediums such as mirror, slabs of concrete – and playing with the illusion of space, and the idea of an artwork within an artwork.

One stand-out piece of is installation “Wells,” in which he placed reflective polygon mirrors on the floor. The art work provoked the public into confronting the fears of staring into a deep, dark well.

Pistoletto’s encouragement of active interaction with his work is particularly evident in installation “Venus of Clothes,” where old, dirty clothing is hung up in front of a copy of a statue of Venus, in a statement about how decadent society treats beauty.

In 2003 the artist was awarded the Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale for his contribution to art. He also presented work “Love Difference – Artistic Movement for an InterMediterranean Politic,” a project coordinated by Cittadellarte’s Politic Office, which consists of a table shaped like the Mediterranean basin, surrounded by chairs representing different countries , around which the artist presented various different activities .

For more information http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/mostre_future_pistoletto.aspx

Nancy Guzman

Michelangelo Pistoletto is an artist who always gets a reaction. For a truly sensory experience, go along to the MAXXI and let yourself be drawn in by Pistolleto. Rent apartments in Rome to complete the trip.

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Translated by: Poppy
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On at the MAXXI until the 2nd of November is exhibition El Borde de Fuga, which comprises a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection, making it the perfect platform for an examination of Italian art over the last 30 years.

The show – which is accompanied by book Il confine evanescente, which brings together the work of Italian contemporary artists from the last 60 years – will be the setting for a detailed discussion of the MAXXI’s collection. The book, just like the exhibition, aims to identify a cohesive identity formed by the plurality of contemporary Italian art. The authors, Gabriela Guercio and Anna Mattirolo – who also commissioned the exhibition – assert that the main objective has been to draw attention to the “frontier of escape” separating Italian art in recent decades.

The exhibition includes works from artists Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Incola De Maria, Minmmo Paladino, Faveretto, Airó Mario, Vezzoli Francesco, Tesi Alexandra, Marisaldi Eva, Manzelli Margherita and Alessandro Pessoli.

Sandro Chia, who was born in Florence in 1946, is a key figure in Italian art movement Transvanguardia – along with fellow artists Mimmo Paladino, Incola De María and Enzo Cucchi. The term transvanguardism was coined in 1979 by Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, in reference to a group of artists rising up with new point of aesthetic reference, and who were rejecting the traditions of the Arte Povere movement which had been at the vanguard from the post war years until the 1980s. The transvanguardists were the reaction to the end of a dark era of conceptual art which had seen the loss of the use of colour. The work then is characterised by it’s large scale, strong use of colour, and multiple use of technique to create figurative pieces. Unlike the vanguard, transvanguardism focuses on individualism, rather than influencing society or transforming art.

The other extreme of Italian art is Vezzoli Francesco – a conceptual artist who challenges consumerism and banality with his iconography, as seen in Avaricia (“Greed”)  -  a spoof advertising campaign for a perfume that doesn’t exist. The work led to a public announcement, directed by Roman Polanski, and starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, in which both woman fight to buy a bottle of Avaricia, thus ridiculing the irrational behaviour caused by consumerism. The piece is inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Belle Haleine: Eau de Violette, only the artist replaces Duchamp’s portrait with his own. His most recent creation was a performance art piece with Lady Gaga at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

For more information – http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/en/schede/confine-evanescente-book

Nancy Guzman

If you’re interested in learning about how contemporary art in Italy has evolved, the new exhibition El Borde de Fuga, at the Maxxi is the perfect place to start. Buy the accompanying book, Il confine evanescente, and curl up with it at one of the apartments in Rome

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Translated by: Poppy
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The MAXXI in Rome stands out for its avant-garde curator, who always presents the most innovative artists of today. Now he strikes again with an interesting exhibition centred on the works of Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the most important figures of the art scene in recent years.

The Italian artist made his name in the art world as one of the pioneers of “Arte Povera”, and like German artist Joseph Beuys, he prompted a paradigm shift with regard to the definition of art itself, stipulating, art as a highly sensitive universal expression.

The curator Carlos Basualdo has designed an exhibition in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which will present one hundred works by Pistoletto that highlight his extensive artistic research, focusing on the representation of self,  and the creative collaborations that have marked a turning point in his work. However, the most important section of the sample is stitched around the series “Minus Objects ¨ a set of several pieces from the ’60s, noted for their minimalist aesthetic. Finally, we have a workshop to experience his recent utopic project “Cittadellarte” in which Pistoletto explores the democratization of art and, in the spirit of Beuys, proposes the opening of art to the masses, and underscores its potential to propel social changes.

For “Fashion Citadellarte”, part of the utopian project, the artist joined forces with the editors of Vogue Italia, to introduce young designers in the world of eco-textiles and sustainable textile production. Prepare yourself for this important international exhibit, which will open Oct. 28th at the Museum of Philadelphia, and then will move to the halls of MAXXI in the coming year. In it you will see Pistoletto testify as a strong believer in social change. For now we encourage you to rent apartments in Rome, to keep track of this interesting artist, and enjoy your next visit to the Eternal City, where you can see the best in both contemporary and ancient art.

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Gino de Dominicis was an Italian artist obsessed with immortality and the unseen, that’s to say, things which are able to transcend the earthly and human realm. He has become an invisible artist, whose presence is only manifested in his work, in the here and now. Always absent, he avoided the press at all costs and refused to give permission for his work to be reproduced in photographs, so it is quite hard to find photographic material documenting his work.

His obsession with the ethereal and metaphysical realm reached such extremes that at his exhibitions the works themselves reserved  the right to remain anonymous, as in general they did not bear  titles or other data that would help the viewer to categorize and pigeonhole the works, albeit minimally. De Dominicis, and his art, until now, have been shrouded in mystery. His artistic interventions made use of different types mediums and techniques, and included work on wood, paper, canvas, sculpture and installations. Another key part of his broad language of art, besides his remarkable fascination for the human figure, is his reference to characters from epics like Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king seeking immortality, or Urvashi, the Hindu handmaiden of the gods.

De Dominicis, unfortunately, was never able to overcome his own death. He died prematurely in 1998, leaving behind a great and inspiring legacy, a strong picture that pays tribute to the beautiful, esoteric, secret world beyond the palpable.

The “The Immortal” at the newly minted  MAXXI in Rome presents the first and most comprehensive retrospective of this extraordinary artist’s works, and visitors can enjoy it until 7 November. The exhibit will explore more than 130 works which delve passionately into themes such as immortality, metamorphosis, evolution, the invisible, the anti natural, and that magical time suspended between past and future.
Rent apartments in Rome and discover the great mysteries of this fascinating artist.

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Kutlug Ataman is a Turkish artist and filmmaker whose work brilliantly transcends the boundary between reality and fiction. His videos explore the fragility of personal identity, and the artist is particularly interested in individuals who are outside conventional social categories. What Ataman really finds striking are the outsiders, those who no longer have much to lose, but so much to gain. Thus, his artifice reasserts with absolute certainty the notion that identity is not firmly rooted in the individual, and more like a costume we put on daily.

And this is where the Ataman’s work takes on a fascinating strength and depth. If identity is challenged as the primary basis and foundation of all that is our reality, our life becomes a complexly textured interplay between real memories and imagination, between fact and fantasy. In his work, Ataman displays, consequently, the obvious intersections between these two terms, diluting, finally, the boundary between reality and fiction.

As of September 12 Rome’s MAXXI has been home to one of his most recent and ambitious works, a video installation titled “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies”, in which Ataman once again, takes up the issue of the construction of identity, without losing sight of its social dimension. Ataman returned to Turkey, as an intermediate point between east and west, where this contradiction between two worlds is evident, to examine points of the fragile collective identity that generate shock. Once again the protagonists are marginal figures, who are on the verge of forging cultural and social identities.

Rent apartments in Rome and be sure to catch this fantastic exhibition at the MAXXI.