09/09/2015
Photo: Elena Radice
For the first episode, artist Arianna Carossa will present the book "The Aesthetic of my disappearance", alongside a retrospective of some of her latest production.
Introduced for the first time at the Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, "The Aesthetic of my disappearance" is a limited edition of 100 copies, sold in the U.S. by Printed Matter.
The volume, edited by Blisterzine in partnership with Tintoria and Senatura, presented for the first time in Italy, is an interviews’ collection with Italian and International curators about nine shows never realized, projects which took place only in the curators’ and the artist mind.
Arianna Carossa’s practice reflects on the object, assimilating the imagery and replacing it somewhere else transfigured, elevated to icon. Starting from the primary gesture of looking, choosing and juxtaposing, the artist creates pending environments, broke narrations full of tensions and subconscious rememberings. Carossa works with installation, sculpture, painting, video and photography, starting almost exclusively by found objects or things produced by others, mostly focusing on interpretation. Sacred images recontextualized, deprived of their iconographical power, or simple artifacts assembled or modified, become contemporary symbols denying an imagery to create another one.
"I made the object the central element in my artistic practice as to be part of an hypothetical resistency where I wish for the sacred to come back, avoiding contributing to physical and visual saturation, a sort of ecological ethic. The use of others’ artworks to create mine, as in the case of Anemic Cinema by Duchamp, Turrel’s installation at Guggenheim, Giò Ponti’s furnitures, Cobra Group majolicas, finds place in meaning’s transformation, going back to the symbol’s dimension, to Nietzsche’s illusion. My research, starting from the rescued object, pushes to the almost phobic extremes of avoiding the physical and visual overpopulation so much to deny the object/artwork physicalness, going back to the word, to the verbal sacrality, with its symbolic, metaphisic and magical corollary. The project of not producing artworks, but describing the imaginary presence in real places, starts from here, a discourse on image and physicalness denial, an aesthetic of the disappearance, the incipit of a silence."
Arianna Carossa was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1973. Lives and works in New York City.
Carossa’s work has been showed in Documenta 11(“Souvenir aus Genua,” Kunstbalkon Kassel, Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany), Guggenheim Museum (“James Turrel and Me, Story of Love Affairs,” New York, USA), Frieze NY 2013, MACRO Museum (“Road of Contemporary Art,” Rome, Italy), Galata Museum (“Doing Things Going Places,” Genoa, Italy), Foundation for Contemporary Art, Rivara Castle (“Sound Of My Soul,” Turin, Italy), Spallanzani Museum (“Ketos 2.0,” Reggio Emilia, Italy), Vittoriano (“Ente Comunale di Consumo,” Rome, Ital y), Museo Archeologico Castel San Giorgio (Prima c’erano glialtri”, La Spezia, Italy).