ORLAN AAKA ORLAN
curated by Eugenio
Viola
prometeogallery by Ida Pisani, Milan 18.11.10 | 08.01.11
Church of San Matteo,
Lucca 20.11.10 | 08.01.11
Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani will be opening the exhibition “ORLAN AAKA
ORLAN”, curated by Eugenio Viola, on Thursday 18 November in its Milan premises
in via Ventura, and on Saturday 20 November in the church of San Matteo in
Lucca.
ORLAN’s work simultaneously brings into play matters concerning
identity, taboos about opening up the body, the shattered myths of a dispersed
femininity, the public and private spheres, and the limitations of art,
language, and life.
Real body and imaginary body, the body of emotion and experience, the
mystical body and the social body, the diffuse body and the hybridised all
blend together in a play of cross-references and self-quotations. Here, the
present tense of the artist’s work confers new topicality on its own past,
always incorporating it and reintegrating it as an element that can be
infinitely modulated and rearranged. One expression of this approach is The
Harlequin’s Coat, ORLAN’s latest performance operation, which marks a shift
from the use of surgery to that of biotechnologies as a new medium to be
explored. Making its world premiere in the gallery’s Milan premises, we see a series
of photos of a work that started in 2007 in collaboration with the Australian
collective SymbioticA, and that is still in progress. Into a culture dish the
artist has placed some cells of her own skin hybridised with those of people of
different ethnic origins, in order to obtain dermal shreds of different
colours. Together, these are used to create an organic, sentient “harlequin’s
coat”, as a metaphor of the melting pot of contemporary society. This pays
tribute to the ideas expressed by Michel Serres in Laïcité, his preface to Le
tiers instruit, a book on which ORLAN had already based her fifth
surgical-performance operation, Opération-opéra, introducing this project as
the terminus ante quem.
In the church of San Matteo, ORLAN – which is itself a pseudonym that
has fused perfectly into her own person – faces Saint ORLAN, her provocative
alter ego, which recalls Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, a paradigmatic
work of post-Tridentine Baroque Rome. She emphasises its combination of
spiritual tension, emotional power and sensuality, embarking on a long
artistic-existential journey to reinterpret religious iconography in the West.
This irreverent, blasphemous and iconoclastic return to the subtly subversive
power that was always latent in the Baroque poetic vision is amplified in the
subsequent Réincarnation de Sainte ORLAN, in which the artist de-functionalises
plastic surgery by taking it outside the realm of medical legitimacy as a means
of transformation, applied by and to Self, but especially as a means for
creating her works. In the end, the provocation of the flesh and the
overturning of the body give way to yet another of ORLAN’s alter egos: that of
AAKA, the extreme expression of an identitary nomadism constantly poised
between the real and virtual worlds. This is symptomatic of the
multi-dimensional and multimedia evolution that for many years has been so much
a part of ORLAN’s research.
Since 1964 ORLAN has been working with photography, video, installation,
performance, and sculpture. In 1977 her Le Baiser de l’Artiste performance at
FIAC in Paris caused a huge scandal. In 1978 she established the “International
Symposium of Performance in Lion”. In 1982, ORLAN launched Art-Accès-Revue, the
first magazine of contempora- ry creativity on the Minitel, France’s precursor
to the Internet. From 1990 to 1993 she staged nine surgery-perfor- mances in
Europe and the United States. In 1998 she started a series called
Self-Hybridizations. In 2007, after a residency program at the SymbioticA art
lab in Perth, Australia, she started working on cell culture.
ORLAN participated in exhibitions in the USA (MOCA and LACMA in Los
Angeles, PS1 in New York, Bass Museum in Miami, Milred Kemper Art Museum in St
Louis), in Italy (Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, P.A.C. in Milan, Palazzo delle
Esposizioni in Rome, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Museo Madre in Naples), in
France (Centre G. Pompidou, Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de
Tokyo, Maison européenne de la Photographie), in Germany (Kunst Museum in
Ahlen), in Austria (Kunsthalle and MAK in Vienna), in Luxembourg (Casino de
Luxembourg), in Switzerland (Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne), in Spain (Fundació
Joan Miró in Barcelona, ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Con- temporáneo in
Vitoria, Centro de Fotografia of Universidad de Salamanca), in Russia (Maison
de la Photographie in Moscow), in Asia (Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul,
South Korea, The National Museum of Art in Osaka, Ja- pan).
She has taken part in a number of contemporary art biennials: Paris,
Lyon, Venice, Istanbul, Sydney, Poznan and Busan. Her works are to be found in
many public and private collections in Europe, in the United States and in
Asia.
Eugenio Viola curated Le Récit, a vast retrospective of ORLAN’s work at
the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, France, in 2007, and edited
the monograph of the same name (Le Récit, Edizioni Charta) and ORLAN:
Post-Identity Strategies at the Kunsthalle in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2008.
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