ISRAEL NOW [REINVENTING THE FUTURE]

Date: 1° Febbraio – 17 Marzo 2013 – Opening 31 Gennaio 2013

Location: MACRO – Piazza Orazio Giustiniani 4 – 00153 Roma

Curatore: Micol Di Veroli

La mostra, presentata dal MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma e realizzata da Glocal Project Consulting, in collaborazione con Drago, è sostenuta dall’Ambasciata d’Israele in Italia, dalla Fondazione Italiana Israele per la Cultura e le Arti e sponsorizzata dal Ministero Affari Esteri, Regione Lazio, Provincia di Roma e Roma Capitale – Dipartimento per gli Affari Culturali, Comune di Roma, Comunità Ebraica di Roma, UCEI e Pitigliani Centro Ebraico Italiano.

La mostra ha ricevuto la medaglia alla cultura dal Presidente della Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano.

La città di Roma è orgogliosa di ospitare Israel Now – Reinventing the Future, una delle più importanti mostre d’arte contemporanea su Israele, realizzate in Europa nel 2013: una piattaforma culturale e multidisciplinare capace di riflettere il dinamismo di una cultura che ha le sue radici in un’antica spiritualità. Il progetto è strutturato intorno ad una selezione di ventiquattro artisti israeliani, provenienti da diverse generazioni e esperienze, e mira ad aprire lo sguardo al futuro, per offrire una possibile concezione alternativa della produzione e del piacere artistico. L’arte contemporanea è sempre stata un barometro del futuro, perché è in grado di dare risposte alle domande della società. In uno scenario mondiale sempre più globalizzato, dove troppo spesso il mezzo è il messaggio, gli artisti israeliani sono riusciti a mantenere un approccio critico, un perfetto equilibrio tra la nuova tecnologia e i vecchi metodi. Sostenuta dal lavoro delle numerose gallerie d’arte, dei musei e di altre realtà, l’arte contemporanea israeliana ha avuto l’opportunità di costruire il futuro, con una costante autonomia artistica e concettuale, senza compromessi o stress imposti dal mercato. Gli artisti israeliani analizzano il futuro. Piuttosto, i futuri – al plurale -, perché tutti i futuri possibili sono inclusi.

La medaglia del Presidente della Repubblica Giorgio Napolitano

Why reinventing the future

Human experience is closely linked to the idea of future. Perceiving what is yet to come, conceiving hopes of progress and redemption, overcoming the anxiety uncertainty. This is the central engine of a life lighted by the eternal flame knowledge, possessed by a compulsive need to understand what appears inscrutable. The future is a constant illusion, a long trip on the Moebius strip that helps humanity to hide the frailty and transitory nature of the human body. Conceiving a specific idea of a nonlinear time and a multiple reality is an integral part of the biological nature of man and his personal and cultural expression. The idea of the future is omnipresent in our language, in our spirituality and is the possibility that emerges from the decisions of the present, influenced by the past. The endless search for this realm of randomness and of the continuous reprogramming of forms, concepts and meanings is a perfect obsession, a clear manifestation of thought extension and of its immortality through endless variables.

Through the widespread ignorance represented by reification, the contemporary collective imagination has learned to conceal the future within the concept of new, so everything is imagined as a “new thing”, a commercial progress that manifests itself only in the specific condition of a slow transformation, perpetually identical to itself. The supermodernity with its excesses of space, time and ego has dramatically distorted any precognitive ability, it has changed the idea of future into an empty ideological and mediatic hyperactivity which effectively eliminates any meaningful content. Modern society must inevitably break free from the constraints of the new as the only form of progress and reinvent the future, to regain a real or dreamy sense of it. Deconstruct a false conception of the future, learning to think about it along with its direct reverse, the past, without making an acceleration of history.

Reinventing the future means not only evolve but to transform into something different, beyond the concept of production of the new and the spectacular. Conceiving the future can not be reduced to the mere formulation of a scenic and artificial word but it has to be the materialization of an abstract and ever changing entity that owns a field, a space and a visibility within a nonlinear concept of time. This conceptualization thus refers to matters of creative nature, because the plastic and philosophical transformation of aesthetic, concepts and forms is a key feature of the artistic process, who draws nourishment from the realities of the past, making a careful investigation of the present and future visions.

Reinventing the future is therefore possible through the artistic activity. Even if the future were to occur aesthetically and conceptually different from what imagined, it can be endlessly reinvented, recovering his new past form. To catch the meaning beyond the signifier, To depart from mythological narratives schemes, to arrive at a personal myth-making of the future. The artistic practice can open up new windows on alternative worlds and give the user clear images, free from any visual constrain. This goal can only be achieved by overtaking the concept of conformity/ nonconformity of the artistic object within the trends of its time.

In developing Israel Now, Reinventing the Future It has been considered the possibility of multiple future scenarios, in order to offer a possible alternative conception of artistic production and fruition as well as of individual and collective identity in relation to the diversity of our planet. The primary intent is also to understand the influence of philosophical and aesthetic forms of the past within a new concept of “making art”, without constrains and preconceptions.

The project is structured around a selection of Israeli artists of different generations and experiences. The land of Israel is a concrete example of a nation looking at the future, because it draws nourishment from a multi-ethnic society, characterized by a deep and ancient spirituality and at the same time it is able to open up parallel scenarios, both real and imagined. Israeli artists are then immersed in an environment that has already developed a solid idea of the future. In an increasingly globalized world scenario, where much too often the medium is the message, they have managed to maintain a critical behavior in relation to new technologies and old methodologies, hailing the remarkable progress of science and of the nation in general as a further possibility of experimentation. On these new directions, opened by a nation constantly projected towards social development, the artists in participating at IsraelNow-Reinventing the Future have been able to build alternative routes, with an eye to the international artistic investigations while firmly maintaining collective and personal identities.

The supermodernity of the contemporary art

Opening a window on future or futuristic circumstances, through the work of art and consequently by means of an artistic event like IsraelNow – Reinventing The Future, involves the demolition of certain rules of behavior that characterize the large international exhibitions.

In her introductory essay Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, critic and art historian Florence Derieux asserts that the history of art of the second half of the twentieth century has become a history of exhibitions, of major projects and no longer the history of works of art. This concept, now widely shared, implies the exponential growth of an extraordinary decisional power by the curator who ends up objectifying an excess of ego for which we tend to value only the project and not the independent power of the work and of the image.

In 2003, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija presented their project Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale. At that time, the concept of utopia, reached a dystopian size, because the artworks included in the exhibition ended up being crushed by a too ambitious curatorial vision, making them useful only to justify the project. Utopia Station is therefore a good example of what is written by Florence Derieux. As part of this specific supermodern behavior expressed by curatorial practice, the risk is to totally lose the importance of the artist and of the work.

In tracing the guidelines of Israel Now-Reinventing the Future, the approach that is used is meant to overthrow these mechanisms, avoiding to transform curatorial practice into a work of art but without altering the main concept of the exhibition. Specifically, each decision was made with the invited artists and each work is juxtaposed with the other while maintaining its distinctive identity, as in a compendium of stories told in first person. Emphasize the process of free creation of the future and at the same time reflect the experimental nature of all artistic expression, these are the focusing points of a project aimed at extending the usual criteria of artistic fruition, while avoiding unnecessary special effects.

Conclusions

Turning from the concept of static and monolithic exhibitions slave to a rigid curatorial view, into a radically dynamic experience like the search of possible futures, is equivalent to the passage from the simple collection of objects into an alive and pulsating exhibition, like a living organism in constant becoming. Beyond the rhetorical strategies and the imaginative power developed by any textual criticism, the work of art appears as the unique and irreplaceable sensorial engine able to bypass its time and anticipate the future. On this basis, the artists in the exhibition have literally gone beyond the concept of a closed future, giving the observer a series of exquisitely open personal theories spanning the objective evidence to plunge into new space-time dimensions, rather than rely on a one-dimensional reference system. The future is waiting only to be reinvented, be it a new way of thinking to the social sphere, to look to new technologies or creating new forms. Contemporary art is thus a point of vantage, on everything which our mind yearns thirsty.

Micol Di Veroli

Press Release (PDF)