English version below

Can Altay, Céline Condorelli, Josef Dabernig, Liu Ding, Petra Feriancova, Luca Frei, Falke Pisano, Marko Tadić: questi i relatori che nella giornata di mercoledì 29 novembre 2017 — presso la sala Carroponte del FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea di Via Piranesi di Milano – partecipano al seminario internazionale dedicato alle pratiche artistiche che hanno fatto del display il proprio oggetto di riflessione e produzione. Curato da Marco Scotini, l’appuntamento è promosso da NABA (Dipartimento di Arti Visive) e FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea e si inserisce nel più ampio progetto iniziato in NABA quindici anni fa come piattaforma di dibattito curatoriale – Utopian Display – con cadenza annuale.

Mediante la forma dialogica, l’incontro Utopian Display: Props & Tools intende approfondire molti temi tra cui il rapporto attuale tra sistemi d’esposizione e forme di controllo o di empowerment, la relazione tra strutture di produzione e di presentazione, il retaggio della institutional critique sulla attuale generazione, ecc.
Molte le domande a cui, i vari artisti cercheranno di dare risposta: può diventare il display uno strumento di lettura? Che genere di utopie ha raccolto nella storia? Qual è la sua relazione con la curatela? Con le forme di gerarchizzazione? Con i modi di discriminazione? Quali sono i regimi di visibilità e invisibilità che esso informa? Che cosa potrebbe mai essere un contro-display?

Provenienti da differenti esperienze e geografie (dalla Cina alla Turchia, dall’ex Est Europa al Brasile) gli artisti di Utopian Display si confronteranno sul più generale terreno delle politiche espositive delle biennali, dei quartieri museo e dell’esportazione dei brand museali, quali effetti della globalizzazione.

Da Support Structure di Céline Condorelli al padiglione Sistemi Individuali di Josef Dabernig e Igor Zabel alla 50° Biennale di Venezia, dagli spazi di lettura di Luca Frei ai modelli per spazi socio-economico-politici di Can Altay, per citarne solo alcuni. Piuttosto che con le figure dei curatori, la ripresa di Utopian Display, dopo otto anni di interruzione, intende ripartire dalle più ampie ed estese componenti dell’exhibition making contemporaneo: il display, i pubblici, le forme comunicative, ecc.

Per leggere il  Comunicato_stampa_UTOPIAN_DISPLAY_FMCCA

PROGRAMMA —

Convegno in Inglese con traduzione simultanea in Italiano

10.00 – Introduzione di Marco Scotini
modera Elvira Vannini

10.30 – Céline Condorelli – Making things public
11.00 – Luca Frei – We do not work alone
11.30 – Josef Dabernig – Exhibition display as a sculptural tool
12.00 – Petra Feriancova – I cannot help myself to manipulate my own work but I can do it for the others

 12.30 – 13.15 Dibattito e domande
13.15 – 14.45 Pausa pranzo

modera Andris Brinkmanis  

15.00 – Falke Pisano – Re-presentation and cultural reproduction
15.30 – Can Altay – Setting a setting
16.00 – Marko Tadić – A step back, closer to understanding
16.30 – Liu Ding – Exhibition as exhibition: a few thoughts on the Intertextuality between Artworks and Archival Materials in Exhibitions

17.00 – 18.00 Dibattito e domande

—

Utopian Display: Props & Tools
November 29, 2017, 10am

NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano

Speakers: Can Altay, Céline Condorelli, Josef Dabernig, Liu Ding, Petra Feriancova, Luca Frei, Falke Pisano, Marko Tadić

Curated by Marco Scotini

On Wednesday, November 29, Visual Arts Department of NABA and the FM Centre for Contemporary Art are staging an international seminar dedicated to those artistic practices that have rendered the display the main object of their reflection and production in the Sala Carroponte at the FMCCA. After 15 years since its first appearance as a NABA platform for curatorial debate, the annual cycle of meetings entitled “The Utopian Display” sets out once again with a totally renewed format.

While it is true that the 1998 release of the milestone book The Power of Display by Mary Anne Staniszewski marked a radical turning point in the field of Museum Studies, it is also true that her contribution (along with those of Altshuler’s) disciplined in theoretical terms what had previously been addressed by artists such as Group Material, Antoni Muntadas, the Artist Placement Group, Brian O’Doherty, Daniel Buren and Marcel Broodthaers among others, thus making it a tool of investigation once more. In fact, over the last fifteen years, a whole new artistic generation on an international scale has emerged which has begun to question, problematise and innovate the tactics and conditions of the exhibition, to the point of turning the display itself into the object of their production.

“Utopian Display: Props & Tools” sets out to bring together some of the main exponents of this trend, trying to make them dialogue with one another and articulate the discourse around concrete experiences and speculative nodes, such as the current relationship between the display systems and forms of control or empowerment; the relationship between production and presentation structures, and the burden of institutional critique on the current generation, etc. The seminar also aims to provide the opportunity to analyse the single approaches to the theme and the individual (or shared) experiences of putting on view not only one’s own but also other people’s artefacts. Can the display become a tool of learning? What kind of utopias has it reflected over history? What sort of relationship does it have with curating? With forms of hierarchisation? With forms of discrimination? What regimes of visibility and invisibility does it foster? What might a counter-display ever possibly be?

Coming from various different experiences and geographical areas (from China to Turkey, from the ex-Eastern Bloc to Brazil) the artists in “Utopian Display” will meet face to face on the more general terrain of the exhibition policies of the Biennials, of museum neighbourhoods and the exporting of museum brands as consequences of globalisation. There are many contributions from these artists to the reflections made on display techniques, and that which for years has remained invisible and unobserved now becomes the device at the very heart of their practices.

From the “Support Structure” cycle by Céline Condorelli to the “Individual Systems” section by Josef Dabernig and Igor Zabel at the 50th Venice Biennale, from the reading spaces of Luca Frei to the models for socioeconomic-political spaces of Can Altay, to name but a few. Rather than with the figures of the curators, after a break of eight years, the revival of “Utopian Display” means to start out from the broadest and most widespread components of contemporary exhibition making: the display, audiences and means of communication.