Wolfgang Laib
… e vidi cose che ridire né sa né può …
- Luogo:
- Milan
- Data:
- 25 ottobre 2023 – 13 gennaio 2024

During the #MAOTempoPresente residency programme, artist Marzia Migliora spent a period of several months between 2022 and 2023 at the MAO museum. She studied the works kept in the museum's storage, assimilated the objects, stylistic features, and images from the collection, and created a composite alphabet. This alphabet was then employed to compose Il Rituale del serpente (The Serpent's Ritual). The tapestries referred to as Il Rituale del serpente (2023) partially occupy the monumental entrance staircase of the MAO. They are derived from a large roll of paper measuring 130 x 9140 cm, featuring a mixed technique of collage, frottage, and drawing. The artist created them based on certain ritual objects and sculptures found in the collection. These items are not currently on display in the MAO's visitor route and thus hidden from public view. In this extensive drawing, various subjects of different natures, ages and cultures intersect and collaborate with each other. The narrative is communicated through imagery that allows each element to coexist in a single paroxysmal and ahistorical environment. The drawing comprises references to post-industrial human history, nature, and deinaga/serpent symbolism, creating a cohesive and logical flow of information. Additionally, technical term abbreviations are explained when first used.
The exhibition Pensiero video. Disegno e arti elettroniche (Video Thinking. Drawing and electronic art) presents works by Lucio Fontana, Hans Namuth – Paul Falkenberg – Jackson Pollock, Mario Schifano, Wolf Vostell, Gianni Toti, Fabrizio Plessi, Studio Azzurro, Bill Viola, William Kentridge, Grazia Toderi, Giacomo Verde, Michele Sambin, Nalini Malani, Quayola and of the “noble father” of the video experimentation Nam June Paik, whose extraordinary “Little Italy” (1990) is exhibited. Authors who are different, far apart in time, geographic areas and training, but joined in a path of research tended to the return of a historical cross – section and to promoting an inedited retrospective look, which put in dialogue the personal and public sphere, the personal education of each artist and the evolution of the analogic and digital media, they chose to express themselves and to enrich their own research. “Pensiero video. Disegno e arti elettroniche”, allows us to enter in a relationship with a temporality that is different from the “frozen” one of photography or from the “animated” one of the moving images. If we accept the metaphor of the “time like a flow”, drawing, with its erasures, modifications, with the multiple and simultaneous assemblies of lines and signs, represents a model of “backbeat”. A backbeat that in the dialogue with the electronic works opens to a series of considerations on the image, on the gaze of the artists from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional plane of the finished work, in its composite declinations.
Mitchell Art Museum at St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, USA. In the 1960s, happenings, minimalism, and performance art contributed to introducing the concept of time into contemporary art. However, it was not until artists began to experiment with technology, utilising instruments such as computers, Kodak Super 8 cameras, and Sony Portapak video cameras, that time became engraved as a novel dimension in visual art, replacing inches on museum labels. This exhibition brings together groundbreaking artwork by seven artists who explored the malleable, symbolic, affective, and societal dimensions of this perpetually elusive subject, whilst investigating the evolving viewer expectations of new art.
New installation for the 26th edition of Luci d'Artista, Turin
Untitled (Radical Objecthood) is an exhibition that explores the idea and meaning of sculpture today through a group of artists across generations and geographies, interlacing nonlinear narratives and reaffirming the centrality of the physical object in contemporary practice. Curated by Piero Tomassoni, the exhibition takes place in the garage of the new Mayfair landmark building 60 Curzon, evoking the seminal contemporary art show Contemporanea, held in the underground parking of Villa Borghese in Rome exactly fifty years ago.
From October 8, 2023, GAMeC presentsARTISTS' FILM INTERNATIONAL #15. Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini, which represents GAMeC's participation in Artist's' Film International, the network dedicated to video art born in 2008 from an initiative of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, involving some of the most important international contemporary art institutions and artists from all over the world. As usual, each institution was invited to point out an artist from its country and present its work through a video work in relation to the proposed theme, which for this edition-which sees a continuation of the hybrid format adopted in recent years, both online and in-presence-is "The Diaspora." Curators Sara Fumagalli and Valentina Gervasoni selected for GAMeC the work Alphabet. The space between us and the unknown (2021) by Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini a pair of artists born in Milan in the 1960s and living in Berlin since 2002.