Guardami - percezione del video (2005)

Catalogue linked to exhibition of commissioned work by international artists working with video.

Abstract: Guardami.Percezione del video, Brief diary of a project.

I don't know if one can talk in terms of "genius" for all the artists involved in Look at me. Perceptions of video (Guardami. Percezione del video). What is certain is that many of them help to turn on that "inner light" within us which Woolf mentions in the quote above, to "make visible" that which is latent, not yet fully expressed, and (in a certain sense) that which is invisible. The aim of this exhibition is to outline the various kinds of sensory stimulation which artists are acquainting us with, and have been doing so, by means of the use of moving images, whether these are shot on video or film. We have chosen to avoid turning images into a spectacle, which, of course, represents one of the possible approaches; but we did not intend to go down the road of purely seeking a 'shock effect'. On the contrary, we feel that a certain apparently low-key tone, a far cry from large-scale productions and mega-investments, is more suited to describing the exhibition clearly. The work of many other artists could have been included (one thinks of names such as Doug Aitken and Kutlug Ataman, or Douglas Gordon or Paul Pfeiffer, to mention but a few), but the available timescale and space did not allow such a large-scale operation. So we decided to stick to the work of some of the pioneers of the video-art to introduce the art of the new generations, in a bid for dialogue and alternation, and for the sake of comparison. Personally, I think the earliest videotapes by Bruce Nauman are still the best of their kind, and I am pleased to be able to re-stage two fundamental works, Bouncing in the Corner No. 1 and Walk in Contrapposto (both dated 1968)3. Alongside Nauman it will be possible to see Sacha and Mum, a dense and powerful black-and-white video made by Gillian Wearing in 1997. The hugs and caresses which soon fade into a conflict between a mother and her daughter, in a loop which regresses, instead of progressing, are confusing to the observer. Does love turn into hatred, or vice versa? The same question seems to be posed by the young artist Sefer Memisoglu lu, who depicts the borderline between innocence and cruelty in a video in which the concept of duration and time (as in the case of Nauman and Wearing) is thrown open, albeit by means of a more linear narration.

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