Christian Holstad

GALLERIA CIVICA DI MODENA
Corso Canalgrande 103
September 20–January 10

Christian Holstad, Learning to Read Between the Lines, 2008–2009, pencil on newspaper, gold leaf, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Christian Holstad’s first solo show in Italy, titled “I Confess,” is something of a retrospective, given the large number of his works on view from the past ten years, but it also offers an additional view of his output: Every piece can be considered in light of a possible confession. The admission in question seems to be a spiritual turning point for the artist. In the first of two contiguous spaces, Holstad presents a votive, chapel-like work that comprises planks of wood nailed together to form walls. Twelve new drawings are affixed on these walls, essentially the twelve stations of a via crucis wherein the protagonists seem to be deformed and crippled outcasts who nonetheless find a possibility of redemption in the light of the pure gold brushstrokes that surround them.

The second space is also measured off in twelve stages, each of which is characterized by a group of sculptures made from used clothing, clothes hangers, various accessories, and snakes that consist of rich fabrics. Some seem to be soaked in urine (although perhaps it is only faded yellow paint), and through a sophisticated synesthetic process the viewer can nearly smell the acrid odor, as if it were a reference to the limitations of the human condition.

With these themes of creativity and desecration, the exhibition might be perceived as a mystical journey, indeed. However, in the press materials the curator, Milovan Farronato, cautions the viewer, provocatively referencing Kafka and Saint Augustine, and their views that even an authentic confession must necessarily communicate a certain measure of falsehood. Here, truth and pretense seem to be two sides of the same coin.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Ariel Orozco

FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY
Piazza Montevecchio 16
October 1–November 21

Ariel Orozco, Loop, 2009, three wheelbarrows, birdseed, canary, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Ariel Orozco’s first solo exhibition in Italy encompasses various socioeconomic concerns with objects and images that subvert the viewer’s initial impressions. While the artist’s early body of work was defined by public acts tied intimately to recurrent metaphors, the development of his practice has recently switched toward an emphasis on exhibiting the results of process-based works, avoiding documentation of the artist’s presence altogether.

Personal memory confronts reality and social convictions, yielding fragile outcomes, in pieces such as Déjà Vu (all works 2009), an installation that overturns the boundaries between performative actions, sculpture, and photography. A flashy (yet broken) bicycle lies outside the gallery’s entrance—scars and rust marring this otherwise barely used item, as if the bicycle didn’t finish its first ride. In the farthest of the gallery space’s four rooms, an identical bicycle bears the same scars, an attempt to provoke the titular déjà vu experience. The work is didactically completed by photographic documentation of the action that brought about the damage. The recurrence of symbolism in Orozco’s work is fairly explicit in Turista, a photographic sequence depicting a bicycle wheel spinning through a vehicle graveyard, but also makes an appearance in Loop, an installation consisting of a living canary in a room occupied by nearly two tons of birdseed, underlining the disproportion between availability and necessity.

— Francesco Stocchi

Gianni Colombo

CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Piazza Mafalda di Savoia
September 16–January 10

Gianni Colombo, Topoestesia, 1970/2009, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Castello di Rivoli’s Gianni Colombo retrospective is his first at a public museum in Italy, though the country had seen previous exhibitions featuring the artist alongside his brother, designer Joe Colombo. This Turin exhibition thus fills a research-based gap regarding an artist who, particularly as a member of kinetic-art collective Gruppo T (founded in Milan in 1959), radically focused his artmaking on what became an essential design premise: to place the viewer at the center of the work. The resulting pieces are functional “machines” that led their users to perform a series of discrete actions and movements of the body and the eye—beginning with 1959’s Rilievi intermutabili (Interchangeable Reliefs) and Strutturazioni pulsanti (Pulsating Structuralizations).

Then came Colombo’s environments—reconstructed in the exhibition—such as his first work expanded into the third dimension, the Strutturazione cinevisual abitabile (Habitable Kine-visual Structuralization), 1964. The practicable, performative space—assailing all who enter with overwhelming sensory stimuli—developed.

Colombo’s desanctification of the artwork, his reflections on the role of the viewer as an active agent, and his delving into relationships between space, time, and body are themes that still course through today’s art. An interview with Olafur Eliasson, published in the exhibition catalogue, is, in this sense, an indication of fertile connections with later artists.

In turn, Colombo’s influences are also on view; within the chronological arrangement of his investigations, from 1953 up to his final work (Opus incertum, 1992), viewers first encounter the artist’s earliest and lesser-known works: ceramics, drawings, and felt pieces from the 1950s that reference everything from art informel to Fontana and Klee.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Artur Zmijewski

GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN
Limmatstrasse 270
October 31–December 23

Artur Zmijewski, Democracies, 2009, still from a twenty-channel color video, 2 hours 26 minutes.

“Where is the world?!” wails a group of Palestinian women in Jerusalem during a weekly protest against Israeli occupiers in Artur Zmijewski’s singularly brilliant new video Democracies, 2009, one of two documentaries by the Polish artist that compose this exhibition. The women’s angry lament is a sobering corrective to 1980s-era sing-alongs like “We Are the World.” But their cry is also echoed by the marching crowds in the twenty-some public gatherings of varying political tenor—street demonstrations, state funerals, war reenactments, nationalistic football rioting, and mass religious services—that Zmijewski and a small crew shot in Europe and the Middle East over the past three years.

As individual works of up to ten minutes each, the videos feature Polish feminists pushing strollers while their jackboot-wearing countrymen decry them as Nazis, drunk German football fans exalting their flag while silenced Turkish kids watch on, and Israeli peaceniks facing off with their enraged, Arab-hating brothers. As a collective film running more than two hours, Democracies is a formal and political tour de force: examining the common visual language of protest—flags, religious paraphernalia, drums, and riot gear (as well as the diverging ones: reggae on the left, military bearing and haircuts on the right), while exploring how democratic citizenry responds to power and an often outsize lack of it.

In Two Monuments, 2009, Zmijewski tightens his focus, if not his ambition. The artist held two gender-separate workshops for Polish immigrants in Ireland and the working-class Irish who felt their skills were being supplanted. Both groups designed a public monument describing their relationship to the labor market and to each other. As Zmijewski films the women (mostly domestics) and the men (construction workers) brashly or haltingly discussing their feelings of resentment and powerlessness (“Out of work at the moment, and can’t get a job ’cause of you Polish”), building the monuments, and celebrating with drink and an impromptu jam session after, he delivers an uneasy visual essay on the global labor market—among political systems that tout democracy but whose economic policies rarely deliver it—that is as deft as it is dismaying. “Where is the world?!” the artist seems to be saying. Perhaps here, and as shell-shocked as ever.

— Quinn Latimer

Stefan Burger

FREYMOND-GUTH & CO.
Brauerstrasse 51
October 29–December 24

Stefan Burger, Besser arm dran als arm ab (It’s better to be poor than lose your arm), 2009, ink-jet print, anodized aluminum, text, 22 4/5 x 14 1/5 x 2 4/5".

Contemporary artworks that reference John Cage’s seminal 4' 33" are a dime a dozen, yet few are imbued with the brilliantly pithy spirit of the original, from 1952. So it was with some surprise that I found myself spellbound by Stefan Burger’s 4' 33" (Dormicum IV), 2009. For the video, beautifully shot by Gabriel Sandru and Tolga Dilsiz, the artist takes the titular sleeping pill off camera, then sits down at a spotlit piano and begins to nod off. As Burger swoons over the keyboard in a physical struggle to stay awake, his movements strangely ape the familiar dramatic gestures of a concert pianist caught in flagrante with a piece of music. Below the swooping drama of the top half of Burger’s body, however, the artist’s hands are mostly still. In homage to Cage’s conceptual gesture, Burger’s nodding off takes on a clever and weirdly poetic cast, while simultaneously poking fun at the ubiquity of the composer’s work.

Traces of this marriage of wit and poetry appear throughout Burger’s other artworks as well. Brutvorrichtung für Kleingruppen im Kunstsystem (Brooding Device for Small Groups Within the System of Art), 2009, is a series of wooden chairs with handmade cushions that have bronze casts of avocados dangling from their corners. The chairs are meant to be utilized by the gallery staff until they are sold, but the beauty of the piece lies in the strange charge of its title (Burger’s titles tend to be awesome) and its stranger fruit. Meanwhile, a motley crew of framed ink-jet prints of objects and architecture are upstaged by a glass vitrine with the phrase TOTAL-LIQUIDATION running across it. Indeed, the well-worn green silk lining the interior of the former window-display box is bare but for the spectral, bleached-out geometric shapes that indicate the former presence of goods now long gone. In this piece, Burger’s impish and electric doubts—about the making, selling, and showing of art—are everywhere, even if the wares are not.

— Quinn Latimer