Discover the new Sardinian exhibition of Luigi Fassi at MAN presenting different Mediterranean artists who explore their social and personal identity
Text by: Annarosa Laureti
For the new exhibition season began last November 9, Luigi Fassi, new director of the Museum in Nuoro, Sardinia, has curated three original and independent projects conceived as a unique dialogue with spectators and visitors. Strong themes – the sense of belonging to a community, the solitude, the distance from home country and the missing of it – are faced and filtered by the eyes of five artists and by their own past.
Dor Guez takes part with the solo exhibition “Sabir”. His historical and political art gaze and approach are deeply influenced by his own story and being: he belongs to the Christian Palestinian community in Israel, being part therefore of a minority into a minority. Throughout two video artworks, “Sabir” – Arabic word from Latin root “sapere” (knowlegde) and that names the entire project – and “Sa(mira)”, an ambient installation made exclusively for MAN, and archival documents gathered in a work in progress named “The Christian Palestinian Archive” (CPA), he tries to give voice to his community and reflects on a collective event – the Christian-Palestinian diaspora – that many people often ignore.
The Mediterranean sea, with its sound and sunsets, is the setting of this fascinating yet complex story and provides a direct link to the other solo exhibition “Sogno d’oltremare” (Overseas Dream) by the French-Ivorian artist Francois-Xavier Gbré.
A selection of photographies that portrays Western African capitals together with a series of pictures, done during a journey in Sardinia, set up an imaginary and, at the same time, very authentic conversation between an African man and his faraway friend that has abandoned his home country.
Gbré, capturing desolated territories, archaeological sites, ancient and ghostly industrial settlements and harnessed natural landscapes, tells us the story of an Isle whose soil has been step on by many people and cultures and that appears not so different from Mediterranean coasts of African continent.
Reality and fantasy, instead, blend, in a melancholic way, in “O Youth and Beauty!”, the last exhibition shown, inspired by the homonymous tale by the John Cheever.
As the American writer, but with a figurative painting language in place of words, the canvas of Anna Bierger, Louis Fratino and Waldemar Zimbelmann narrate a daily routine suspended between beauty and regret.
If Bierger adopts a photographic angle to portray unknown characters in unknown places, the Kazakhstani artist Zimbelmann combines Asian culture with German gaze in his literary and material paintings, recalling the style of 60s and 70s illustrations.
Finally, Fratino’s artworks are a reflection, and an homage too, of metropolitan life in-between hectic moments and relaxed time.
Cover: Louis Fratino, Maritime landscape, 2018, Private Collection, Amsterdam
“Sabir”
“Sogno d’Oltremare”
“O Youth and Beauty!”
Nuoro, Sardinia
From November 9, 2018 to March 3, 2019
