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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/

On the 23 of September BBC reports that “a police officer shot fatally an unarmed black motorist in Tulsa, Oklahoma while he was standing next to his broken-down car”. On the 24 of September the NMAAHC has opened its doors to the public after the inaugural visit of President Obama. NMAAHC is part of the Smithsonian Institute and it has the aim of telling the story of how African-Americans have shaped US history. The process of re-writing history within the so called post-colonial studies, is happening in the USA and in the EU and the result is that what have been considered an official story is starting to be challenged. The very tragic coincidence of the NMAAHC opening with a new fatal attach by police to a black man, makes one wonder about the power and the impact of museums on society, this is a provocative thought. Obviously the building has just been open, its aim and vision are wonderful and its impact on society will be judged in the years to come. The fact that in the meantime innocent black people are dying in the streets of the USA because of a still ongoing  history of racism, makes one wonder if a focus on more efficient, urgent operations would have not served the black cause better. Again this is a provocative thought for us all. It seems almost ironic that Obama, the first black president who failed to stand to the expectations of the black people of his country who voted for him, is the person to cut the red ribbon of NMAAHC the very same day an unarmed black man is killed by police.

Laura Tori Petrillo with Jabulani Maseko (Slade College) at Photographers Gallery. Photo Andi Galdi Vinko

Academy Now has selected for the fifth consecutive year, new art graduates in London this summer. We visited Slade School of Fine Art, the RCA, Chelsea College, Central Saint Martin and Goldsmiths University. Many of the works that we have seen were made in response to the issues such as refugees crisis, terrorists attacks, economic inequality, gender, feminism and new technology.