Galleria Lia Rumma is pleased to announce Dream Lovers: The Films 2008–2014, the third solo exhibition in Italy of works by Tobias Zielony. The opening is on Thursday 19 February 2015 in the Gallery's spaces in Naples.
Selected by Florian Ebner for the German Pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, Tobias Zielony is now showing eight videos made between 2008 and 2014, after the exhibitions in 2007 and 2010, which were held in the former premises in Via Solferino in Milan, and in Naples respectively.
Tobias Zielony has been around the world to tell the story of the dark side of adolescence and has portrayed the night-wandering teenagers of Los Angeles, the little Manitoba Indians in their reserves, the squalor of Knowel West in Bristol and the northern districts in Marseille, life in the Halle-Neustadt complex made by the DDR, kids in the Vele di Scampia, and young people in Ramallah. Most of his sitters pose proudly, imitating film and rock stars, illustrating their dreams and aspirations, and conveying a mythical vision of themselves, yet their melancholy looks reveal the chasm between illusion and reality, between mythical fantasy and the world they live in. Right from the outset, his artistic research has adopted a narrative and visual approach that is typical of cinema, heightening the gap between the real and the unreal, and between what goes on behind and in front of the lens.
In 2014 Zielony made two new films while working for a couple of months in Ramallah. AL-AKRAB (THE SCORPION) pays tribute to the opening scene of the surrealist film L'Âge d'or by Luis Buñuel. Zielony's most recent film is KALANDIA KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS, and it is also the first on which he has worked on the stage design: a remake of Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), it is set near the Kalandia checkpoint, a very busy crossing point through the wall that divides Ramallah from Jerusalem.
