With BYO. Bring Your Own the MAN gives a title not so much to an exhibition but to an attitude that has characterized its short history and at the same time consolidates a habit that aims to underline the capacity for openness, hospitality and attention of a contemporary museum inserted in a such an eccentric context.
The MAN, agile and versatile, does not hesitate to make space, temporarily putting aside its own collection to host another, and in this movement offers its physical space as the protagonist, not just a neutral white paper ready to be written, but a complex “structure” with which to dialogue in order to write a new story.
Exhibiting an art collection in a context different from the original one necessarily means recalibrating and reinterpreting it; this appears even more true in the case of the Teseco Foundation for Art, whose works, in perfect coherence with the company’s cultural objectives, aimed at disseminating contemporary themes to a wider audience than that of professionals, are installed inside the Teseco Management Building, an environment that is difficult to assimilate to the aseptic one of a museum, where instead the works contribute not only to designing the space but define a real conceptual score.
BYO. Bring Your Own therefore presents itself as a broad selection: the result of an “external” look that aims to propose an approach to the works of the collection without producing an automatic departure from the project that brought them together. Precisely because creating an exhibition (like giving life to a collection) still means making a selection, in designing the exhibition we related to the entirety of the Teseco collection as a given panorama, with the aim of clearly bringing out some lines present at the its interior but made less explicit by the considerable quantity of material acquired by the Foundation over the course of approximately fifteen years.
An exhibition is always the expression of a particular point of view, and what qualifies and makes a point of view authentic is not the presumed capacity for global vision, but the desire to transform a gaze, however “partial” (the limitation is condition of seeing itself), in a “targeted” and “delimited” vision: only within this last perspective does each presence find, in an exhibition, its necessary and correct justification in relation to a given space and the other presences, in a sort of mutual illumination.
The catalog accompanying the exhibition cannot therefore be read as exhaustive of the Teseco collection but as the instrument of an exhibition which, targeted and delimited, aims to project a particular light on the Italian and international art scene of recent years, starting from the works of a collection. An exhibition that ranges from photography to sculpture, from video to painting, but also from large installations to decidedly more intimate works, attentive to the international panorama without forgetting the young national presences or giving up the skilful recovery of important artists trained in the Sixties and Seventies, not so well known in our country.
Edited by Saretto Cincinelli and Alberto Mugnaini
The artists: Marina Abramovic, Franz Ackermann, Stefano Arienti, Massimo Bartolini, Vanessa Beecroft, Elisabetta Benassi, Simone Berti, Botto and Bruno, Matti Braun, Candice Breitz, Antonio Catelani, Claude Closky, Daniela De Lorenzo, Carlo Fei, Adam Fuss, Alberto Garutti, Vidya Gastaldon and Jean-Michel Wicker, Alex Hartley, Thorsten Kirchhoff, Jürgen Klauke, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Marisaldi, Amedeo Martegani, Laura Matei, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Juan Muñoz, Luigi Ontani, Panamarenko, Luca Pancrazzi, Cornelia Parker, Paola Pivi , Tobias Rehberger, Andrea Santarlasci, Cindy Sherman, Elisa Sighicelli, Katharina Sieverding, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Giovanni Surace, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Francesco Vezzoli, Chen Zhen, Heimo Zobernig, Italo Zuffi.
