Edited by Cristiana Collu, Saretto Cincinelli, Roberto Pinto
One of the most discussed themes in contemporary art is certainly the idea of ​​borders that artists have addressed both in a metaphorical and personal sense and in a geopolitical sense, with all the social consequences and international implications that this entails. The widespread interest in recent years in establishing boundaries and trying to trace differences also has its origins within artistic practices: the attention that art has dedicated to space and to the knowledge of its limits and ‘symptom of a specific attitude to put the border territory between things under observation. There are borders well delimited by borders, walls, armed surveillance, and there are less obvious borders, although often equally rigid and impassable. We are faced with the paradox of a globalization that seems to imply the loss of borders only for information, money and goods. The walls, which we saw falling at the end of the last century, have essentially multiplied. In a broader context it could also be said that external borders refer to an idea of ​​exclusion, of diversity, while internal borders refer to differences in class, religious belief, ethnicity, gender.
Boundaries fill our lives, they surround us completely, they are the tool that allows us to classify and recognize the multiplicity of our reality, and, at the same time, they are a fruit of our ability to establish conventions. The notion of border plays a crucial role at any level of representation and organization of the world around us. Regarding borders, Claudio Magris wrote: “They die and rise again, they move, they are erased and they reappear unexpectedly. They mark the experience, the language, the space of living, the body with its health and its illnesses, the psyche with its splits and its rearrangements, politics with its often absurd cartography, the ego with the plurality of its fragments and their laborious recompositions, society with its divisions, the economy with its invasions and its retreats, thought with its maps of order”. Perhaps it is precisely this richness of meanings and aspects that makes this topic interesting. The works of the artists on display seem to reiterate precisely the variety of possible interpretations, therefore not giving up “observing that strange space that is found “between” things, that which, by bringing into contact, separates, or, perhaps, by separating brings into contact with different people, things, cultures, identities and spaces”.
Where do you look at a border from? What do expressions like inside or outside really mean? Is there an outside of the inside or an inside of the outside? These are some of the questions raised by the exhibition.
Artists: Francesco Arena, Maja Bajevic, Emanuele Becheri, Jota Castro, Yael Davids, Pepe Espaliu’, Carlos Garaicoa, Mona Hatoum, Alfredo Jaar, Magdalena Jetelova, Seila Kameric, Daniela Kostova, Jorge Macchi, Liliana Moro, Mateo Mate’, IngridMwangiRobertHutter, Andrea Nacciarriti, Adrian Paci, Riccardo Previdi, Michael Rakowitz, SASI Group, Stalker, Jules Spinatsch, Franck Scurti, Daina Taimina, The Institute for Figuring, Enzo Umbaca, Catherine Yass.
The exhibition is accompanied by a video review curated by Maria Rosa Sossai which presents the works of Massimiliano and Gianluca De Serio, Alex Cecchetti, Armin Linke, David Krippendorf and, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in Rome, the works by Bogna Burska, Jacek Molinowski, Julita Wojcik.
