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PLUS ULTRA

Opening: 31 August, 7pm
Caldaro-Bolzano, Italy
Introduction by Irene Hell and Laura Tori Petrillo

Curator: Laura Tori Petrillo

Show continues until: 30 September
Opening Times: Tuesday-Sunday 10.30am-12noon 5pm-7pm
This week we are in Bolzano, Italy, to open Karin Schmuck and Anna Messere exhibition Plus Ultra at Le Carceri (Karin is among the 10 Shortlisted Artist of Academy Now 2017).

They are working in the three floor building right now: all the works are site specific which is very exciting and equally challenging.

For this show, Karin has invited Anna and together they envisioned a place where visitors move from an uneasy, maybe even uncanny experience to lighter and brighter spaces as they walk up along the stairs. The building has a strong presence as former jail. It makes think about restraint and freedom, despair and dreams and the two artists pushed these ideas to the point of “real” utopia in the attempt to move boundaries both physical and psychological.
A book will be available after the opening to document the exhibition and the newly produced pieces.

We cannot wait to be there and you are all invited to join us this Thursday!

Karin Schmuck, (1981, Bolzano). diplomata in Fotografia quest’anno all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, partecipa a varie mostre in Italia e all’estero. Finalista di Academy Now 2017, secondo miglior portfolio a Fotografia Europea 2017, e vincitrice del Premio COMBAT 2017.

Anna Messere (Vasto,1983), diplomata all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna nel 2016, partecipa a varie mostre in Italia. Selezionata per Sideways (Fotografia Europea 2016), finalista del Premio Abbado 2015, finalista del Premio COMBAT 2017.

Laura Tori Petrillo at Fondazione Modena Fotografia

This is an intensive course focused on strengthening artists BIO+STATEMENT. It is especially recommended for those artists who want to see their application selected for Calls, Sponsorship, Residencies, MA courses in the EU, UK and USA.

Deadline 30th of March 2017

For more details and info, please send an email to: info@academynow.org

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a collector and President of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (founded in 1997). She always think ahead: her Turin space – ‘more kunsthalle than museum’, she told ArtReview – shows an admirable dedication to the new. She supports young artists – recent shows at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo included Adrián Villar Rojas and Ed Atkins. She is an extremely active patron of the arts. She is a Member of the International Council, Museum of Modern Art, New York (since 1996); Member of the Friends of Contemporary Drawing, Museum of Modern Art, New York (since 1996); Member of the International Council, Tate Gallery, London (since 1997); Member of the Advisory Committee for Modern and Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art (since 2008); Member of the Amici Sostenitori, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (since 1993) among others.

http://www.fsrr.org

Vittoria Matarrese, Palais de Tokyo

Since 2010 Vittoria Matarrese is the head of cultural program & special projects and chief curator of performance art at Palais de Tokyo -Paris, among the most effervescent, audacious and pioneering institutions in Europe. It is the dynamic place for the artists of our time a rebellious wasteland with the air of a Palace, an anti-museum in permanent transformation….

In 2013, Vittoria Matarrese was nominated Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture Aurèlie Filippetti. Before she was the artistic director of Villa Medici in Rome.

PALAIS DE TOKYO

AN at Fondazione Fotografia Modena, 24 November 2016

Laura Tori Petrillo was invited to give a talk to the MA students of Fondazione Fotografia Modena on the 24th of November. She presented the shortlisted artists of the past editions of Academy Now and she explained how she got to work with some of the protagonists of the current so called art system in Italy, Austria, Belgium and the UK. She stressed on the importance for new aspiring artists to write strong bio and statements, she advised on how to approach museums and galleries and she encouraged them all to be ambitious and to dream big.

Laura Tori Petrillo with MA students at Fondazione Fotografia Modena

Laura Tori Petrillo at Fondazione Fotografia Modena

Laura Tori Petrillo at Fondazione Fotografia Modena

Wael Shawky, still from the film trilogy Al Araba Al Madfuna

Wael Shawky is today acclaimed as one of the most exciting artists to emerge from the Middle East in recent years. He is from Alexandria, Egypt, he gained his MFA in 2000 at the University of Pennsilvania and while talking with him we were very pleased to see that he is not only a very committed, talented, hard working artist who is re-writing history but is also a very modest, warm person. Very nice meeting you Wael!

Laura Tori Petrillo, Wael Shawky and Abdellah Karroum

Andrey Kuzkin, October 2016. Photo Claudio Cazzara

We met Andrey during the “grand-opening” of the new Centre for Contemporary Art Pecci. He was going to make his performance on a little hill in front of the restaurant of the newly re-opened museum. We watched Andrey digging a hole in the muddy soil, then he got completely undressed for his  performance “Natural Phenomena” where Kuzkin alone stood for around 15 minutes upside down among the grass and the trees, burying his head in the ground.

Andrey Kuzkin, Performance, 15 October 2016, Museum Pecci, Prato. Photo Claudio Cazzara

Andrey Kuzkin, Performance, October 2016, Museum Pecci. Photo Claudio Cazzara

Andrey Kuzkin, Performance, October 2016, Museum Pecci. Photo Claudio Cazzara

Andrey Kuzkin, Performance, October 2016, Museum Pecci. Photo Claudio Cazzara

Andrey Kuzkin, Performance, October 2016, Museum Pecci. Photo Claudio Cazzara

This Friday  the new video work by artist Dinh Q. Lê (1968, Vietnam), titled The Colony (2016) can be seen in Peckham Rye’s abandoned Electric Theatre, which was one of London’s earliest cinemas when it opened in 1908.

Dinh Q. Lê, interested in post-colonial politics, filmed The Colony in the desolate environment of the Chincha Islands off the West-Coast of Peru. Home to huge populations of seabirds, the otherwise uninhabited islands were once amongst the most contested places in the world. When ‘guano’, the accumulated excrements of Peruvian Booby birds, became known as one of the most powerful fertilisers to European farmers and US plantation owners in the 19th century, the ‘Great Guano-Rush’ began.

Spain, Peru and the United States battled over the Islands and in 1856 the US Congress passed the ‘Guano Islands Act’, authorising the US to claim unpopulated guano islands anywhere in the world as national property. But it was the British merchants who controlled the guano trade, forcing thousands of Chinese bonded workers to live on the islands and to harvest the bird dung under brutal working conditions…

To know more about this work commissioned by Art Angel, please click here:  https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/the-colony

Really Good by David Shrigley is a 7m-high sculpture of a hand giving a thumbs up sign, which the artist hopes will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has been cast in bronze with the same dark patina as the other statues in Trafalgar Square, London.

The Fourth Plinth Programme invites world-class artists to make new works for the capital. David Shringley was born in 1968 in Macclesfield but now lives and works in Brighton. His work focuses on creating drawings, animations and sculptures that reflect the absurdity of contemporary society. He has had solo exhibitions at Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand, Hayward Gallery in London and the Yerba Beuna Centre for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2013 he was nominated for the Turner Prize.

http://davidshrigley.com/