June 29th – August the 5th 2017 / Vernissage: June, Thursday 29th at 07:00 p.m. / @ the exhibition space TRA, by Ca’ Dei Ricchi, via Barberia 25 (Treviso, Italy)
The exhibition has no entry fee, and is accessible from Monday to Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to 01:00 p.m. & from 03:30 p.m. to 07:30 p.m.
Special openings on Sunday from 5:00 pm to 8:00 p.m. with guided tour.
Organic Memory is an exhibition that deals with the contemporary legacy of the World Wars through the voice of international artists. The artworks presented at Ca ‘dei Ricchi communicate among them and with the visitors through the languages of sculpture, ready made, video art and photography, all united by a constant, implicit or manifest, recall to the soil. The exhibition itinerary is thought as a constant dialogue between an interior and an exterior space, in a dichotomy between the intimacy of the home walls – which lose their reassuring character because of the conflict – and an open space where the ground, which is first of all a battlefield, can instead play a protective role.
Thus, the space opens up to an apparently comfortable area where the british artist Victoria Lucas involves the audiece in a reflection on war and commemoration, through a video where the mud – in which every scene takes place – becomes a commemorative substance that embodies the human experience and trauma of war. Next to Lucas’s artwork there are the photographs of the young chinese artist Ting Bao, in which memory and memories emerge thanks to a postproduction work on the film, on which the artist deposits soil and organic elements, leaving the impression of a memory that has to be rediscovered. Anitra Hamilton and Cosima Montavoci complete this intimate space exhibiting artworks that evoke human fragility, through an ironic dialogue between conflict and death.
The shovels of Sisyphean Task – by the slovene sculptor Boris Beja – recall a soil that can also hide, protect and suffocate, as the mud in Lucas work. Beja presents – with his ready made – what a war object is, after a careful reflection. Placed in the second part of the itinerary, a sort of open space reconstructed, this object appears to be highly symbolic, as it is incapable of fulfilling its function. The ground evoked by Beja is a natural element also well known to Ilisie Remus: with his ready made the artist proposes key elements of the soldier’s uniform combined with soil, dirt and wood, bringing an ambivalent meaning. In fact, the material objects absorb mourning and incorporates memory, giving birth to something new, that is organic and strictly linked to life.
Nathalie Vanheule‘s ashes serves as a symbolic elements of the conflict: it is suffocating, but it is also linked to fire and therefore to purification and rebirth. Finally, the work of Cambodian Lang Ea is a sculpture made up of a stack of twenty extremely realistic heads, posed in silent stasis and characterised by changing expressions. This is a heavy and at the same time very delicate material installation that leads to a reflection on human nature and our bond with the earth.
The exhibition intends to stimulate a reflection on the ambivalence of every conflict and on the importance of memory, as a necessity for human existence. This memory is not merely a distant and impalpable re-elaboration of human experience, but becomes organic, tangible, as it is related to the concepts of soil, identity and belonging. The testimony of war, experienced in first hand or through our legacy, can thus open up a dialogue aimed at metabolizing and transmitting a memory that must not be just hidden and individual, but requires collective involvement
In collaboration with the association Treviso Ricerca Arte
Artworks by: Nathalie Vanheule, Boris Beja, Lang Ea, Cosima Montavoci, Anitra Hamilton, Ilisie Remus, Ting Bao, Victoria Lucas
