ALIGHIERO & BOETTI DAY

From noon to midnight on Saturday, 28 May 2011, in the evocative setting of theAuditorium RAI in Turin—designed by Carlo Mollino in 1952—artists, art historians, critics, writers, musicians, scientists, and collaborators and friends of Alighiero Boetti have been invited to come together and investigate the wide-ranging, influential work and ideas of one of the 20th century’s most significant, yet most enigmatic artists.

Stefano Arienti, Stefano Bartezzaghi, Thomas Bayrle, Achille Bonito Oliva, Robert Cailliau, Clino Castelli, Maurizio Cattelan, Germano Celant, Laura Cherubini, Francesco Clemente, Lynne Cooke, Pino Corrias, Roberto Cuoghi, Mariangelica De Gaetano, Mario Dellavedova, Pietro Derossi, Patrizio Di Massimo, Peppe Frana, Guido Fuga, Giorgio Galli, Mario Garcia Torres, Piero Gilardi, Mark Godfrey, Emidio Greco, Rolf Lauter, Corrado Levi, Giorgio Maffei, Randi Malkin Steinberger, Andrea Marescalchi, Massimo Mininni, Jonathan Monk, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Francesca Pasini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paola Pivi, Christian Rattemeyer, Maria Teresa Roberto, Daud Khan Sadozai, Alì Salman, Salvo, Federico Tiezzi, Tommaso Trini, Andrea Valle, [iaŋ] [voo], Adelina von Fuerstenberg,and Lawrence Weiner are just a few of the names who have enthusiastically signed onto the project, and who will be paying tribute to the figure of Alighiero Boetti in many different ways. Through the stories they can contribute—as extraordinary travelling companions, or simply as artists, thinkers and critics who look back on Boetti’s work with fascination—Alighiero & Boetti Day will offer a fresh interpretation of Boetti’s pivotal role in Italian culture and the international art scene.

Alighiero & Boetti Day is a one-of-a-kind, hybrid event, a cross between a conference, artistic project, performance and biographical narration: twelve hours of sessions, open to the public, which will include individual speakers, discussions, roundtables, screenings of films and interviews, presentations of never-before-seen material, readings, artistic incursions and theatrical gestures, fitting together like a thousand tiles to compose a single, vast, colourful mosaic. An invaluable opportunity to learn more about the artist,Alighiero & Boetti Day is also, above all, a way to look back over Alighiero Boetti’s artistic practice through the eyes of those who were close to him and still are: the experts and artists of different generations who continue to keep his legacy and thoughts alive.Alighiero & Boetti Day experiments with a new exhibition and research format: a platform of exchange centred not on works but on stories and first-hand accounts, aimed at celebrating an individual who achieved legendary status for many artists and cultural figures in the past, and who seems even more significant today.

With Alighiero & Boetti Day, Artissima and the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi are dedicating an impassioned tribute of international resonance to Alighiero Boetti in his native city, Turin, retracing the many facets of the artist’s insightful work, and affirming his central role as one of most influential figures in the history of contemporary art.

Alighiero & Boetti Day is a project curated by Luca Cerizza, author of Le mappe di Alighiero e Boetti (Electa); Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi; and Francesco Manacorda, director of Artissima.

The event is co-produced by Artissima and the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi as part of Giorno per Giorno 2011, an initiative sponsored by the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, Turin.

BRIEF BIO

Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) was born in Turin, where he first gained attention for his work in the sphere of Arte Povera in January 1967. A kaleidoscopically versatile conceptual artist, alchemist and indefatigable traveller, over his three-decade career he produced many different types of work, for some delegating the manual execution to others—as in his famous collaborations with Afghan embroiderers—but always in accordance with very specific rules. These experiments yielded his ballpoint monochromes (blue, black, red, and green) in which the coloured-in surface of the paper makes words emerge; his many embroidered works on fabric, ranging from his Maps to his compositions with letters—always square and multicoloured, like Order and Disorder—or the Everything series, intricate puzzles that juxtapose magazine illustrations, desktop items, animal silhouettes, and more. Other categories of works are exclusively by Boetti’s own hand: from his Postal Works—which play on the mathematical permutation of stamps, the adventure of a journey through the mail, and the secret beauty of the sheets travelling inside the envelopes—to his pencil "exercises" on graph paper, based on musical or mathematical rhythms. His last works include strikingly monumental projects, like the 50 tapestries with texts in Italian and Persian (shown in Paris in the exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre, 1989), or the 50 kilims displayed at Le Magasin in Grenoble in December 1993, for the last show whose opening the artist was able to attend.

Alighiero Boetti took part in some of the most prestigious and emblematic exhibitions of his time, ranging from When Attitudes Become Form (Bern, 1969) to Contemporanea (Rome, 1973), from Identité italienne (Paris, 1981) to documenta 7 (Kassel, 1982), to The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968 (Guggenheim Museum New York, 1994). His work was in the Venice Biennale six times, with a dedicated room in 1990 and a posthumous tribute in 2001.

Between autumn 2011 and autumn 2012, Alighiero Boetti will be featured in a major travelling retrospective organized by Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Tate Modern (London) and MoMA (New York).

ALIGHIERO & BOETTI DAY
A tribute to the figure of Alighiero Boetti
Ort: TURIN, Auditorium RAI – Via Rossini 15
Kuratoren: Luca Cerizza, Massimiliano Gioni, Francesco Manacorda

Künstler: Stefano Arienti, Stefano Bartezzaghi, Thomas Bayrle, Achille Bonito Oliva, Robert Cailliau, Clino Castelli, Maurizio Cattelan, Germano Celant, Laura Cherubini, Francesco Clemente, Lynne Cooke, Pino Corrias, Roberto Cuoghi, Mariangelica de Gaetano, Mario Dellavedova, Pietro Derossi, Patrizio di Massimo, Peppe Frana, Guido Fuga, Giorgio Galli, Mario Garcia Torres, Piero Gilardi, Mark Godfrey, Emidio Greco, Rolf Lauter, Corrado Levi, Giorgio Maffei, Randi Malkin Steinberger, Andrea Marescalchi, Massimo Mininni, Jonathan Monk, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Francesca Pasini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paola Pivi, Christian Rattemeyer, Maria Teresa Roberto, Daud Khan Sadozai, Ali Salman, Salvo , Federico Tiezzi, Tommaso Trini, Andrea Valle, [iaŋ] [voo], Adelina von Fuerstenberg, Lawrence Weiner ...