The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome is pleased to announce the upcoming opening of the exhibition You Got to Burn to Shine on February 5.
The title You Got to Burn to Shine (Per risplendere devi bruciare), borrowed from the famous collection of poems by the American poet, artist, and performer John Giorno, highlights the complexity of the individual's existence in the world and, at the same time, promotes its construction as a subject.
Curated by Teresa Macrì, the exhibition aims to narrate, through a play of references and connections, the discrepancies and processes of redefinition of the world-system and its aesthetic interpretation in the post-ideological era. You Got to Burn to Shine also seeks to analyze how the work of art, within the display of art, can express critical thought and represent new mental geographies, both individual and collective. Most importantly, it explores which devices can be triggered to transform one's positions into aesthetic-visual suggestions that touch the collective consciousness; which paradigms can be activated in an ever-changing present to subvert concepts and stereotypes and configure a universe of meaning.
The selection of artists for You Got to Burn to Shine is built on a behavioral and attitudinal affinity, which involves linguistic deconstruction as a primary strategy of interaction with the political dimension, since art is the assimilation of a political act and a poetic act. This attitude, despite the differentiation of the practices used (video, installation, sculpture, poetry, film), unites the artists in taking a stance of dissent against the conventions and hypocrisies of reality and directs them towards the creation of antagonistic and mobile spaces in which to re-imagine the world, whether in a utopian key or not.
In the variation of the intertwining and emotional vibrations that the artists outline, a radical critique of an existing and never generic order emerges, along with the temptation to overturn it to open up new perspectives. The selection of artists traces a sort of disarticulated trans-generational artistic path, ranging from the presence of John Giorno to Roberto Fassone, through which the critical-experimental drive that permeates aesthetic practice beyond categories and generations is evident. At the same time, the fusion of various languages (visual arts, cinema, music, poetry, anthropology) suggests the idea of a structural framework that hybrids the various disciplines, now increasingly interconnected. The choice aims to amalgamate the various aesthetic experiences, with their respective roles and weights within international aesthetic production, and to assert how radical thought and experimental attitude can outline new balances and possible horizons of existence that touch both the intimate and social spheres.
You Got to Burn to Shine is a constellation of intents: the practice of Francis Alÿs addresses, with lightness and humor, the interdependence between culture and power and the hegemonic process that develops from it. Often this engaged position coincides with the musical imagination, with belonging to an upper or underground context, and thus with the emancipation between "high culture" and "popular culture" as in the work of Jeremy Deller and Mike Kelley. An innovative linguistic universe is the one outlined, since the 1960s, by the cult poet-artist John Giorno, whose poetic text is revolutionarily entrusted to the means of communication and directed to mass fruition. His poetic universe is distributed through works such as poem prints, textual wallpapers, musical readings, performances, and happenings. Disorienting is the research of Luca Guadagnino, an unrestrained director and intellectual who, in his cinematic journey, subverts the act of watching and feeling cinema through a visionariness that strongly collides with art. Through the gap between the true and the plausible, often mediated by sarcastic humor, Roberto Fassone realizes works and performances that tend to convert sense into nonsense, to delegitimize widespread collective behaviors and beliefs to access new readings and interpretations of reality. The duo Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, through the video device, reflects on the social and ecological paradoxes of the global era. The relationship between the self and the world, the intertwining of personal history and social history, provide Elena Bellantoni with the critical space to affirm her aesthetic action through performances, videos, and sculptures. It is instead a participatory analysis of the folds of the world that Bertille Bak manages to convey through her dense and rhetoric-free video-reportages, installations, and sculptures. Fiamma Montezemolo, artist and anthropologist, is the emblem of a new reflective subjectivity that merges anthropological research and artistic expression. Her work is formalized on the concept of the boundary and the limit between two disciplines. Krištof Kintera, thanks to his polymorphic alphabet, possesses the madness to invent disorienting worlds, to imagine a parallel one (to the one in which he lives) whose mechanism unhinges conventions, assembles, and merges a sort of reality/surrealism. Luca Vitone continually questions reality and opens up new visions of it or rediscovers the affections that have crossed it. Finally, Sislej Xhafa daily lives the psychic, logical, and logistical geometries of immigration without weaving a consolatory tale; rather, he dribbles them and compacts them into a disorienting paradigm, composed of détournement, conceptual references, and linguistic games.
The exhibition You Got to Burn to Shine adheres to this alternative dimension of reality, visionary, deviant, often ironic and unplanned, supported by a desecrating vis and a pop mood.
Artists: Francis Alÿs, Bertille Bak, Elena Bellantoni, Jeremy Deller, Roberto Fassone, John Giorno, Luca Guadagnino, Mike Kelley, Krištof Kintera, Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, Fiamma Montezemolo, Luca Vitone, Sislej Xhafa.
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