Cinque Mostre

Temenos

Cinque Mostre
Fellows Project Fund
Tempietto del Bramante
Via di San Pietro in Montorio
Rome, Italy
Performance
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Cinque Mostre 2016: Temenos

Temenos by Nina C. Young

In conjunction with the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2016 – Across the Board: Parts of a Whole, which remains on view through April 3, the American Academy in Rome presents the first of two appointments exploring the themes engaged by the exhibition. On March 3 the exhibition will be open exceptionally from 5:00 to 8:00pm.

The composer Nina C. Young, currently the Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, will present Temenos, a performance made in collaboration with the choreographer Miro Magloire that involves dancers Elizabeth Brown Hudec and Daniela Gianuzzi and the photographer Simone Ghera. The piece for two dancers and a violin, specifically developed in relationship to the Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio, addresses the union of sound and movement in relationship to architecture. The project seeks to create a “vocabulary” database of simple gestalt sound–movement couplings that will then be codified into a syntax that can be used in increasing complex compositional and improvisational environments.

Temenos will take place outdoors at the Tempietto del Bramante, Via di S. Pietro in Montorio. Performances are at 6:00, 6:45, and 7:30pm and last approximately twenty minutes each.

Cinque Mostre 2016 is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts and by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

The event is organized in collaboration with Real Academia de Espana en Roma.

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Cinque Mostre 2015

Cinque Mostre
AAR Gallery
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Exhibition
-

Thursday, January 29–Sunday, March 1, 2015

Cinque Mostre 2015

Cinque Mostre 2015 is an annual exhibition of work by current Rome Prize Fellows. This year it includes Fellow-curated collaborative projects and a guest-curated project by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin of Cura. in which Fellows in several disciplines and invited artists take part in a multifaceted exhibition, Milk Revolution, installed in various sites throughout the McKim, Mead & White Building.

Milk Revolution

Curated by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin of CURA.

Artists: Artie Vierkant, Vanessa Safavi, Bunny Rogers, Alessandro Piangiamore, Abinadi Meza, Cynthia Madansky, Adam Kuby, Corin Hewitt, Keith Hennessy, Elias Hansen, Francesca Grilli, Carin Goldberg, Martino Gamper, Anna Franceschini, Luca Francesconi, Andrea De Stefani, Gabriele De Santis, and Tomaso De Luca.

When Allen Ginsberg, writer and poet of the Beat Generation, photographed his friend Harry Smith—a painter, archivist, anthropologist, and film director—in 1985 at the Breslin Hotel in Manhattan attempting to turn milk into milk, he portrayed in a concise image an entire generation called to face major changes and struggles, through the subversive gesture of an impossible alchemy. At times, the impact of an artistic action can assume its own revolutionary force, even if only transitory, fleeting, light. According to Bachelard, poets and alchemists are those who translate into images the spell that the image itself casts on the psyche—a spell that becomes stronger with the poets and alchemists’ deepening knowledge of the basic elements that determine moods, and the ability to manipulate, process, transmute them. Under this reverie of alchemical connections, Milk Revolution brings together the work of fellows from the American Academy in Rome and that of a selection of nonresident international artists, outlining an unsystematic, antinarrative, fluid path, an open device, which contravenes the common sense of a concise thought and amalgamates and moods associated with changes of state, metamorphosis, the temporal span of the work, in an anarchical opposition of elements pitted against approval and control. In the dimension of the exhibition space, the mutant and regressive process acts as a counterpoint to an aestheticized, timeless and suspended ambivalence, probing whims of, autonomy and escape, but also empathy and unpleasantness, fascination and for the elements. The exhibition therefore aims at defining a microsystem in which the mutation of matter, the flow of a dripping, the unpredictable path of wax, elements in a perpetual state of flux, the liberating gesture of a repetitive brushstroke, the impalpable transparency of tulle, the unexpected patterns of faux marble, the frenzied sound coming from a remote place, a wild raptor acting instinctively become a representation of an imagination called to explore the hidden folds of the human being and the “fragile nonsense of always being oneself, constantly becoming something else.”

Prex Gemina

Lakshmi Ramgopal a.k.a. Lykanthea and Paula Matthusen

Christian catacombs associated with female martyrs and donors are unique on account of their rarity. The same is true of the hagiographies of these women, which depict their commitment to complexly defined virtue, while fetishizing their rape and torture as a prerequisite for a sainthood particular to women. Prex Gemina explores the spectral affinities of these spaces by examining the silences that surround them. To do so, it critically engages with techniques drawn from Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), which amplifies ambient recordings with the goal of hearing the supernatural. Recordings of stretched silences, bracketed by questions into the air, are transduced through the walls of the sound installation space. By doing so, Prex Gemina creates an interface, using the walls of a bounded space, upon which visitors listen to the captured loss.

Material Narratives

Anna Serotta with Adam Kuby, Krys Lee, and Liz Moore

This project seeks to explore the interpretation of fragmentary material culture by condensing the cycle of creation, destruction and recreation. Four participants will enact a live performance in which an original text, composed from contributions by several fellows, will be carved into a block of Carrara marble. In a live performance, this block will be fragmented, and then the text will be reimagined via prose passages composed extemporaneously before an audience by two writers.

A Roma

Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud, COMMONstudio

The visual beauty and physical presence of Rome’s iconic monuments have been captured, crafted, and reverberated ad infinitum across the globe in formats ranging from the dramatic compositions of Piranesi prints and Fellini films, to the pages of tourist brochures and the digital image crafting that happens daily from the telescoping reach of selfie sticks. Yet insisting on reading these sites merely as relics of the past to be consumed as image precludes vital conversations about how they continue to live, breathe, and develop in the present day. A Roma seeks a reexamination of Rome’s iconic monuments through an alternative sensory celebration of elements that are too often overlooked. Living material from the various vegetal ecologies of three sites has been collected, cataloged, and processed by means of steam distillation to extract and interpret each place as a unique essence that can be experienced in the form of a smell. By defamiliarizing the familiar, and familiarizing the unfamiliar aspects of Rome’s, new interpretations of both monumental space and urban ecology are made possible. We hope that the installation serves to create moments of discovery in which locals and visitors alike are invited to reexamine their stable expectations, memories, and assumptions about the Eternal City.

Dislodging the Silence: Public Art Intervening in Mussolini’s Foro Italico

Max Page

The Foro Italico remains one of Mussolini’s most compelling and disturbing propaganda sites. Visited by thousands every week on their way to sporting events, the Foro Italico’s extensive mosaic program celebrating Italy’s conquering of Ethiopia, and its monumental male figures around tennis courts and running track, all capture the ideology of Mussolini’s vision of a new Roman empire. But for all its importance, there has been virtually no effort to invite visitors to confront the reality of the fascist ideology displayed on the site. For all its imperial bombast, the Foro Italico is mute about its past.

This exhibition dislodges the silence by proposing ideas for public art interventions for the Foro Italico. Participating artists are: Francesco Arena; Lorenzo Romito and the Stalker collective; Dario Scaravelli and the Startt group; Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock; Stefano Canto, and Cynthia Madansky.

Satellites

Firat Erdim and Olivia Valentine

Satellites brings together the documentation of performances from two distant terrains. Processions, marches, pilgrimages, and parades are collective ways of continuously reaffirming or redefining the significance of civic space. The actions documented in Satellites are attempts to address that ground as individuals. In Segovia, a topography of the city is mapped out through circumnavigations metered by a central bell tower. In Cappadocia, a single figure delineates the open landscape through walking the edges of the table mountains.

Opening hours: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 4:00 to 7:00pm until March 1, 2015.

The exhibition is supported by untitled association. Thanks to Birra Menabrea and Cantina Zaccagnini.

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Event does not include video

Cinque Mostre 2020: Convergence

Cinque Mostre
AAR Gallery
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Exhibition
-

Thursday, February 20–Sunday, March 29, 2020

Curated by: Elizabeth Rodini and Ilaria Gianni
Opening: February 20, 2020, 6:00–9:00pm
Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday, 4:00–7:00pm
Free entrance

Artists: Azza Abo Rebieh, Samiya Bashir, Garrett Bradley, David Brooks, Matthew Brennan + Eugenia Morpurgo, Dina Danish + Jean-Baptiste Maitre, Rä di Martino, Corinna Gosmaro, John Jesurun, Giovanna Silva, and Pamela Z.

Convergence is the theme of the 2020 edition of Cinque Mostre, the annual collective exhibition at the American Academy in Rome featuring work by current Rome Prize Fellows, Italian and Affiliated Fellows, and invited artists. In honor of the Academy’s 125th anniversary and its year-long celebration of cultural and intellectual encounters in Rome, Convergence is a cross-disciplinary exploration of the visual and performing arts installed throughout the Academy building.

“To converge” is to come together, to mingle and intertwine, to coalesce into something new—as two eyes see two images that the brain fuses into a multidimensional whole. The concept of convergence transcends disciplines. It can be applied to the arts and sciences, to technology and the environment, to language, politics, and opinion. When ideas converge, fresh possibilities arise; when viewpoints converge, they reframe our perspectives. In moments of conflict and times of tension, convergence can be a framework for resolution.

Sociologists, psychologists, and cultural critics use this term when discussing a fusion of outlooks and modes of expression. Convergence is equally apparent in the natural world, describing how streams flow into one another and air currents merge into the winds overhead—but also, as revealed in the site-specific work of Matthew Brennan and Eugenia Morpurgo, how familiar landscapes are encountering and responding to environmental change. As our physical present meets our climatic future, the promise of convergence is overshadowed by the danger of collision. Indeed, convergence can be menacing, buffeting us against the unfamiliar, forcing us to adjust to new norms and threatening sameness as we seek to preserve our individuality.

The artists of Cinque Mostre 2020 explore these paradoxes, including the experiences we share and those that divide us. Working in words, sound, projection, photography, and a range of tactile media, they offer their own forms of transformative convergence. Languages strange and familiar mingle in the theatrical and sonic installations of John Jesurun and Pamela Z; Dina Danish and Jean-Baptiste Maitre mash up classical emblems with everyday objects, much as Corinna Gosmaro explores the imprint of old on new within our collective memories. The stories of Rome, its monuments, residents, and visitors, become entangled in the works of Samiya Bashir, Garrett Bradley, and Giovanna Silva.

These spiraling interactions reflect the American Academy’s 125th anniversary theme of “Encounters,” which underscores the cultural intersections—intellectual, creative, and social—that have defined the institution since its founding. Appropriately, with the expanded aims and ambitions of the Academy, the artists of Cinque Mostre 2020 represent an international group of diverse origins, experiences, ages, and backgrounds, from the Roman performance artist Rä di Martino to the Syrian printmaker Azza Abo Rebieh to the Brooklyn-based visual artist David Brooks. Convergence honors their distinctions as well as the ideas that bring them together.

Acknowledgments

The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts. Special thanks to the KNIR and to the Mondriaan Fonds for their support of the project by Dina Danish and Jean-Baptiste Maitre.

Opening Night Performances

John Jesurun, Philoktetes, with Antonio Fazzini, Silvia Gallerano, and Giulio Maroncelli, 6:30 and 7:45pm. Seating is limited and first-come first-served.

Pamela Z, Sonora Spolia, with Pamela Z, Alana Mailes, and Joel Pattison, 7:00pm.

Rä di Martino, (Star) Dust, written by Chiara Valerio, with Iaia Forte and Alessandro Pezzali, music by Mauro Remiddi (Porcelain Raft), 8:15pm.

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Cinque Mostre 2017: Vision(s) :

Cinque Mostre
Fellows Project Fund
AAR Gallery
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Exhibition
-

Tuesday, February 14–Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Cinque Mostre 2017 - Vision(s) :

Cinque Mostre 2017 is an annual exhibition of work by current Rome Prize Fellows and invited artists curated by Ilaria Gianni with assistance from Saverio Verini.

Every Friday at 5:00pm, one or two artists participating in the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2017 - Vision(s) : will give brief presentations on their work.

February 24

Yasmin Vobis / Robert Hutchison (English)

March 3

Phu Hoang / Rachely Rotem (English)
Saverio Verini (full tour, Italian)

March 10

Emiliano Maggi (Italian)
Stanislao Di Giugno (Italian)
Tomaso De Luca (Italian)
E. V. Day (6:00pm Wanda Video / 6:30pm In-Vitro, English)

March 17

Michael Queenland (English)
Kyle deCamp (English)

March 24

Jonathan Berger / Annalisa Metta (English)
Nicola Pecoraro (Italian)

March 31

Enrico Riley (English)
David Reinfurt (English)

Opening Hours

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 4:00–7:00pm
February 14–April 4, 2017

Taking its cue from the multifaceted term “vision” and emphasizing its physical-perceptive, political, supernatural, and mystical aspects, VISION(S) : explores the strategies that artists and scholars employ to re-configure our view of the world. This exhibition brings together different approaches and “ways of seeing,” drawing inspiration from the present, facts from the past, and projections of the future. Employing various strategies, including translation, history, performance, poetry, fiction, and mysticism, the works challenge notions of culture, origin, and belonging.

VISION(S) : offers an encounter between personal investigations of the creative process and the often compromised external gaze of the viewer. The show unfolds along a non-linear thread constantly challenging viewers’ desire to understand through seeing, in which works of art confound styles and genres. Each contribution acts as a unique apparition, in which the spectator is not just a bystander, but an operative participant in a new dimension, acting as observer and producer of visions. The resulting experiences are reminders of what John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing (1972) as “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” unleashing a new process of searching for meaning, one that is imbued with imagination and awareness. Realism and its ordinary, pragmatic view of the world are overtaken by fantasy and prophecy, intuition and illusion. Authors and spectators are complicit in the fabrication of worlds through a different interpretation and construction of what appears to be real.

Participants are: Gundam Air, Gregory Bailey, Cornelia Baltes, Elisabetta Benassi, Jonathan Berger, Kristi Cheramie, Caroline Cheung, Roberto Coda Zabetta, E. V. Day, Tomaso De Luca (in collaboration with Vincenzo Giannetti), Gabriele De Santis, Kyle deCamp, Stanislao Di Giugno, Sean Edwards, Hussein Fancy (collaboration with Accettella-Teatro Mongiovino), Aaron Forrest, Anna Franceschini, Piero Golia, Leon Grek, Grossi Maglioni, Isabell Heimerdinger, Robert Hutchison, Lauren Keeley, Jack Livings, Emiliano Maggi, Christoph Meinrenken, Annalisa Metta, Nicole Miller, MODU - Phu Hoang e Rachely Rotem, Jonathan Monk, Matthew Null, Luigi Ontani, Pino Pasquali, Nicola Pecoraro, Gianni Politi, Michael Queenland, David Reinfurt, Enrico Riley, Danielle Simon (in collaboration with Zazie Gnecchi Ruscone e G.A.N Made in Italy), Francis Upritchard, Alessandro Vizzini, Yasmin Vobis, Bedwyr Williams, and Joseph Williams.

Performances on February 14:

7:00pm, Cryptoporticus: Il Cuore di Wanda (1931–2017), a first-ever live performance of the Futurist radiophonic opera, presented for the first time since its premiere in 1931.

8:00pm, Courtyard: Indoor City (2017), a project conceived by two architects, two writers, a historian, a music composer, and a climate scientist.

Finissage

April 4, 2017, 6:00–8:00pm
A reading of Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, a project by Nicole Miller and Michael Queenland.

A performance of The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins, a project by Hussein Fancy, in collaboration with Jonathan Berger, Caroline Cheung, Leon Grek, Enrico Riley, Joseph Williams, and the Accettella-Teatro Mongiovino.

Opening Hours

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 4:00–7:00pm
February 14–April 4, 2017
Guided visits every Friday. Please check website for times.
FIRST GUIDED VISIT ON FEBRUARY 24 AT 5:00 PM - ROB HUTCHISON AND YASMIN VOBIS

The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts.

The performances of Il Cuore di Wanda and The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins are made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Beer at the opening event offered by: untitled and Menabrea.

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Event does not include video

Trans Bodies: Race, Gender, Myth, and Performance

Cinque Mostre
Fellows Project Fund
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Film Screening
Lecture/Conversation
Reading
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Trans Bodies: Race, Gender, Myth, and Performance

As part of the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2018 – The Tesseract, the American Academy in Rome is pleased to announce a day of encounters between artists, critics, and scholars dedicated to the history, mythology, and contemporary significance of transsexuality in Western painting, sculpture, film and performance. Inspired by the work of current fellows and important figures in Italian art from the cinquecento until the present, this series of presentations and screenings will explore how evolving representations of transfigured, transgender, or nonbinary bodies have created discursive links between bodily hybridity, creativity, and power.

Speakers: Leslie Cozzi, Jessica Gabriel Peritz, and Alessandro Bava. The presentations will be conducted in English.

Screening: A. L Steiner and A. K. Burns, Community Action Center, 2010.

Exhibition: Cinque Mostre 2018 – The Tesseract will be open on 8 March 8 from 4:00 to 8:00pm.

Please see full program in attachment.

The project is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts and the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

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Special Opening of “Cinque Mostre 2019: Δx Displacement”

Cinque Mostre
Conference/Symposium
Film Screening
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Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine - Homo Urbanus

Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, detail of film still from Homo Urbanus, 2017

Screening of films by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine
Workshop with Erin Besler and Ian Besler

On this occasion, Homo Urbanus, a series of seven films created by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, will be projected. The films take the spectator thoughi the cities of Seoul, Bogotà, Naples, Saint Petersburg, Rabat, Tokyo, and Kyoto, constructing a human landscape along the way.

Erin Besler and Ian Besler will conduct a workshop entitled Some Assembly Required. This project explores the distinction between “work” and “activity” in the context of the Cinque Mostre exhibition by creating a set of interactive fold-and-construct model kits of architectural details in Rome, removed from their context and reconstructed as simple model kits. Visitors are encouraged to contribute to the project and help themselves to their own kit—consisting of printed sheets of paper stock—which anyone from adults to small children, experts to amateurs, can fold and assemble. This project aspires to implicate the processes of construction and assembly, typically kept at a distance or rendered invisible in the context of the gallery, as a central and inextricable component of the installation, while at the same time producing and engaging new audiences in architectural design and production.

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Event does not include video

Cinque Mostre 2019: Δx Displacement

Cinque Mostre
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Exhibition
-

Wednesday, February 20–Sunday, March 31, 2019

Cinque Mostre 2019

Cinque Mostre 2019: Δx Displacement
An annual exhibition of artwork and curatorial projects by the Rome Prize and Italian Fellows and invited artists.
Guest curator: Ilaria Gianni
Opening: February 20

Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, Erin Besler, Carola Bonfili, Joannie Bottkol + Allison Emmerson + Zaneta Hong + Karyn Olivier, Michael Ray Charles, Invernomuto, Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong + Judy Chung*, Renato Leotta, Michelle Lou + Marcel Sanchez Prieto + Adriana Cuéllar, Jessie Marino + Michael Leighton Beaman, Helen O’Leary + Joannie Bottkol, Gabriele Silli, Basil Twist + Kirstin Valdez Quade + Kenneth Ard, Francesco Zorzi.

Composed of collaborative projects, under the collective title Δx Displacement, Cinque Mostre 2019 features work by current Rome Prize Fellows, Italian Fellows, and invited artists installed in various sites throughout the McKim, Mead & White Building at the American Academy in Rome, and including a series of performances. The performances presented on the occasion of the opening will be repeated during a collateral event on March 7.

Please note that space is very limited for the performances (at 6:30pm, 7:30pm and 8:30pm) by Basil Twist, Kirstin Valdez Quade and Kenneth Ard. Reservations can be made at the entrance to the exhibition on the opening night. Reservations will be taken on a first-come, first-served basis. The performance lasts ten minutes.

Bringing together works by visual artists, architects, designers, writers, archeologists, art historians and conservators, in a range of media and scales that respond to the various meanings of the term displacement, Δx focuses on conditions questioning the poetics of the ordinary, unsettling a sense of belonging, and disrupting conventional relationships.

The title of the exhibition, which sums up themes explored in different ways by all of the participating artists, takes its cue from the project conceived by Fellows Michelle Lou (composer) and Marcel Sanchez Prieto (architect), who ask “how do our spaces/environments reinforce a sense of place in the world, and how does displacement affect our sense of ourselves?”

A reference point is a recognizable element that grounds our sense of place both materially and immaterially. In order to describe any type of motion, we must indicate an initial position, one that is either shared with other individuals. A frame of reference can thus be geographical, architectural, historical, experience-based or even emotional, and a shift from this initial position, whether physically objective or subjective and personal, is defined as displacement not only by political, philosophical and psychological theories, but by mathematics. The equation Δx = xf ​− x0​ (where Δx refers to the displacement, xf​ to the value of the final position, and x0​ to the value of the initial position) is unequivocal: displacement is the difference in the position of two marks and is independent of the path taken when traveling between them. Following this logic, the American Academy in Rome is itself a dislocated space, and the Rome Prize Fellows are part of a displaced community, albeit one integrated into the surrounding city.

Δx broadly investigates the design and representation of stability, reflecting on the states of permanent upheaval whether social, political or emotional. The works in the exhibition, informed by numerous dialogues between overlapping fields of research, offer a dynamic exchange of opinions. Each intends to disrupt conventional images of natural or built environments of recollection, historical narratives, or emotional or physical perceptions, blurring the limits between reality and fiction, between a now and then, between a here and there.

Through the interplay of disparate media, shifting traditional models of image-making and story-telling, Δx mirrors the human relationship to life, history, vision, space, and nature, creating an experience where the impact of each element reverberates throughout the exhibition. Viewed together, the works provoke a lively discussion around ideas of dislocating and decentering, drawing on the audience’s participation to further enhance the reading of the terms, underlining how the act of displacement is, willing or otherwise, constantly affecting all physical, social and spiritual movements surrounding us.

Opening: February 20, 6:00–9:00pm
Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday from 4:00 to 7:00pm
On show until March 31, 2019
Free entrance

The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts. Special thanks to Cernit and ROSCO production sponsors of the project Macula by Francesco Zorzi.

* Mary Beard, Carmen Belmonte, Michelle Berenfeld, Liana Brent, Thomas Carpenter, Jim Carter, Lan Samantha Chang, Judy Chung, Alessandra Ciucci, Talia Di Manno, Allison L. C. Emmerson, Louisa Ermelino, Maria Ida Gaeta, Vincent Katz, Karen Kevorkian, Eric J. Kondratieff, Lynne C. Lancaster, Mark Letteney, Anna Majeski, Francesca Marciano, Peter Benson Miller, Victoria Moses, John Ochsendorf, Austin Powell, Kirstin Valdez Quade, John F. Romano, Bennett Sims, Sean Tandy, Virginia Virilli, Lauren K. Watel, William N. West.

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Event does not include video

“Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners” Revisited

Cinque Mostre
AAR Cryptoporticus
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Performance
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“Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners” Revisited

A performative gathering organized by Arnisa Zeqo, as part of the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2018 – The Tesseract.

Gossip as a form of communication and political action is the attitude, rather than simply the topic, of this event. This talk show takes place within the display of the work of Mexican artist Ulises Carrion (1949–1989), Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners (1981), an installation included in the ongoing exhibition Cinque Mostre – The Tesseract, curated by Ilaria Gianni. (The installation was created in collaboration with Suzanne Farrin, Ashley Fure, Tiziana del Grosso, T. Geronimo Johnson, Johanna Lobdell, Tricia Treacy, and Joseph Williams.)

For Carrion’s “conceptual performance,” which took place between March and June 1981, a small group of people in the city of Amsterdam spread several semi-fictional rumors about Carrion’s work and life. Almost three decades later, gossip is brought back to life in the infra-mince space of private conversations among friends and colleagues at the American Academy in Rome. Is gossip a form of art, music, and literature? Can gossip become a performative tool for artistic reproduction and narrative? Stolen kisses, night walks, or small glances while waiting for the bus open up towards a broader artistic weaving of the world. Through the various interventions presented at this event, gossip emerges as an undulating reference at the intersection between literature, performance, conceptual art, and life.

Zeqo was the Mondriaan Fonds/Dutch Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in fall 2017. The event will be held in English. You can watch this event at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Program

An introduction by Arnisa Zeqo
A presentation by Joseph Williams and Tiziana del Grosso on a gossip campaign within AAR
A reading on gossip in antiquity suggested by Kevin Moch
A sound pause by Susanne Farrin
A poetry reading by Uljana Wolf
A screening by WU Tsang
A performative movement by Ashley Fure, Aroussiak Gabrielian, and Alison Hirsch

The project is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts.

The exhibition Cinque Mostre 2018 – The Tesseract is open on March 15 from 5:00 to 8:00pm.

Cinque Mostre 2018: The Tesseract

Cinque Mostre
AAR Gallery
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Exhibition
-

Wednesday, February 14–Sunday, March 25, 2018

Cinque Mostre 2018 - The Tesseract

Cinque Mostre 2018: The Tesseract
An annual exhibition of artwork and curatorial projects by the Rome Prize Fellows and invited artists
Guest curator: Ilaria Gianni
Opening: February 14, 6:00pm

Josè Angelino, Sanford Biggers (in collaboration with Michelle L. Berenfeld), Jennifer Birkeland + Jonathan Scelsa, Ulises Carrion, Brandon Clifford + Federico Gardella + CEMEX Global R&D + Simone Conforti + Sean Gullette, Leslie Cozzi, Abigail DeVille, Alessandro Di Pietro, Rochelle Feinstein + Allen Frame + Ishion Hutchinson, Aroussiak Gabrielian + Alison Hirsch with Grant Calderwood (in collaboration with Rome Sustainable Food Project and Irene Tortora), Beverly McIver + Gaetano Castelli, Matteo Nasini, Marco Palmieri, Tricia Treacy*, Arnisa Zeqo**

* with the particpation of: Chiara Barzini, Sanford Biggers, Alessandro Cicoria, Brandon Clifford, Elizabeth Rae Cowan, Alessandro Di Pietro, Ashley Fure, Allen Frame, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Valeria Giampietro, Sean Gullette, Alison Hirsch, T. Geronimo Johnson, Antonella Lattanzi, Johanna Lobdell, Kevin Moch, NERO, Matteo Nucci, Arnisa Zeqo

** in collaboration with Tiziana Del Grosso, Suzanne Farrin, Ashley Fure, T. Geronimo Johnson, Johanna Lobdell, Kevin Moch, Tricia Treacy, Joseph Williams, and the spirit of Ulises Carrion

Composed of collaborative projects, guest-curated by Ilaria Gianni under the collective title The Tesseract, Cinque Mostre 2018 features work by current Rome Prize Fellows, Italian Fellows at the American Academy in Rome and invited artists installed in various sites throughout the McKim, Mead & White Building.

The Tesseract draws upon the innovative ideas gestating within the multidisciplinary and collaborative space of the Academy, developing a series of dialogues between Fellows and Italian artists in residence across a range of practices encompassing visual arts, music, literature, audio-visual production, design, architecture, and technological innovation.

In geometry the tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of a cube. The term was coined by British mathematician and writer of science fiction Charles Howard Hinton in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought, which dealt with the fourth dimension and its implications on human thinking. A century later, the tesseract became the invisible protagonist of A Wrinkle in Time, a children’s novel by American author Madeleine L’Engle, published in 1963. In the book, the tesseract, able to fold the fabric of space and time, gives the protagonists the possibility of travelling in unknown dimensions. “Oh, we don't travel at the speed of anything. We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle”, says Mrs. Whatsit to Meg Murray and her brother Charles Wallace.

The Tesseract is here used as a metaphor to present works investigating how time and its traces offer sources of creative research and visionary inspiration. The works included in the exhibition, from a range of different disciplines, consider particular aspects coming from the past, present, and future, displacing them from a linear, temporal system. They travel in the wrinkles of time and space.

Making use of some qualities inherent to the fourth dimension and its potential extensions, questioning notions of causality, identity, perception, and cognition, the works provide alternative and open-ended readings of what appears iconographically and symbolically fixed, re-imagining time through its formal manipulation. Altering what has been, predicting what could be, or creating a butterfly effect, through the manipulation of symbolic evidences, the participants to Cinque Mostre: The Tesseract, act as time travellers, revealing fragments from an abstract, sometimes timeless dimension.

Making the implausible possible and activating what Samuel Taylor Coleridge, defined a “willing suspension of disbelief”—an essential ingredient of storytelling—the various interventions transport the audience into a frame that not only questions a diachronic intellectual approach to time, but consciousness itself, and the yearning to escape the present moment. Travelling at different velocities, viewers are accompanied in a voyage beyond borders where the tangible is recognizable yet visibly dislodged and relocated.

Bon Voyage!

Opening: February 14, 6:00–9:00pm
Opening hours: Saturday and Sunday from 4:00 to 7:00pm until March 25, 2018
Free entrance

Collateral Events

March 8, 3 – 6 pm: Leslie Cozzi, Trans Bodies: Race, Gender, Myth, and Performance - A study day
March 15, 7 pm: Arnisa Zeqo, Gossip scandal and good manners revisited - A performative gathering

The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts and the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Off
Event does not include video

Finissage – Cinque Mostre 2017: The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins

Cinque Mostre
AAR Lecture Room and Gallery
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Performance
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Finissage - Cinque Mostre 2017 - The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins

As part of the Cinque Mostre finissage, at 7pm in the lecture room there will be a multidisciplinary performance of The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins, a project by Academy community members and Fellows Lisa Baker, Jonathan Berger, Caroline Cheung, Kyle deCamp Leon Grek, Hussein Fancy, Ryan Matos, and Enrico Riley. The performance will feature puppeteers from the Accettella Teatro – Mongiovino, and oboist Flavio Troiani. The project is made possible by the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

The Sicilian Vespers is the name given to a rebellion on the island of Sicily that broke out at Easter, 1282, against the Angevins – Frenchmen who had ruled the Kingdom of Sicily since 1266. Within six weeks, three thousand French men and women were killed, and the occupiers had been expelled from the island. The rebellion ended with the arrival of ships from the Crown of Aragon at the port of Messina.

The Sicilian Vespers and the Tunisian Matins is a collaborative project. Animated by a scholarly attempt to rewrite the famous episode of the Sicilian Vespers from the perspective of North Africa, all the characters of the play are pulled from historical sources. They all once lived but have since become wooden. In order to bring them to life again, the project draws upon poetic and literary sources familiar and less so: Virgil, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Shakespeare, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Hamdis, miraj and maqama. National myths compete with connected histories. Epic vied with Romance. In the end, the play speaks to the familiar and, perhaps, fundamental tension between history and literature.

On Tuesday 4 April the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2017. Vision(s) : will be open from 6pm to 8:30pm. The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts.

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