TRANSIT-1
curated by Adriana
Rispoli/ Eugenio Viola/ William Wells
Madre Museum, Naples
26.03.09 | 04.05.09
The Townhouse
Gallery, Cairo 24.05.09 | 24.06.09
Transit 1 is the first phase of the homonymous project presented in two
locations and at two different times: the first stage in the Project Room of
the Museo Madre on Thursday 26 March, the second at Cairo with the reopening of
the same exhibition, on the premises of the Townhouse Gallery, 24 May next.
The exhibition grew out of the meeting between the young Neapolitan
artist Domenico Antonio Mancini with the two Egyptian artists Sherif El-Azma
and Nermine El Ansari, who spent a short period of residence in Naples, just as
Mancini was enabled to have the same experience in Cairo. The works produced,
all rigorously site-specific, derive their inspiration from reflections on
geographically circumscribed socio-cultural situations which become
universalized by activating a series of short-circuits in history, the present
and the past with its weighty inheritance.
The works are unified conceptually by the meta-temporal use of symbol,
understood as an analogic and inter-subjective sign which communicates a
message comprehensible to the community through an emotional path. They
investigate the power of representation through the media and the narrow
boundary line between real and virtual, subjective and objective, past and
present.
The eagle, the emblem of power and dominion which traverses the whole of
history, from the Roman empire to Saladin, from the Habsburg and Tsarist
empires to the totalitarian regimes, is inverted in its significance in
Mancini’s installation, an intervention that extends into
Alighiero&Boetti’s exhibit on the third floor of the museum, presenting a
metaphorical excursus that takes its cue from Boetti’s singular attitude and
links his research into otherness to the theoretical setting of the Project
Room. Mancini presents a bitter reflection on neocolonialism, the subtle
Eurocentric influence of a less obvious domination than military intervention
but one that is equally deleterious.
The evocative polisemy of the symbol, capable of superseding cultural,
historical, social and linguistic boundaries, returns in the work of El-Azma |
El Ansari, who juxtapose the San Paolo soccer stadium in Naples with its ideal
predecessor: the Roman amphitheater in Pompeii. Two symbolic structures reduced
to a simulacrum in a work that reflects on the meaning of events and their
mythicization, on the temporal collocation and universal projection of a desire
to belong to a community, in the past as in the present.
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