Silences where things abandon themselves

The exhibition Silences where things abandon themselves displays the works of eleven Italian artists who seem to have deliberately turned away from all decontextualising and "strong" reconceptualising of the "thing" within the artistic dimension.

These artists, on the contrary, seem to have chosen a quite different strategy: they work with given "things" without entirely or partly keeping them away from their respective temporal order.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Lemon Trees (1925), by the Italian Nobel Winner prize poet Eugenio Montale. In Montale's verse, one may uncover an ideal response to Ludwig Wittgenstein's conclusive admonition contained in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent": the act of "being silent" is not here to be interpreted as "avoiding to speak", but rather as an active choice of "being silent about something." Thus the verse, in a way, determined the choice of the artists for the exhibition.

These artists create a peculiar dimension of "silence" in which "things abandon themselves" and betray "their final secret" (Montale), a silence that protects the things from common thinking and, in a way, from art itself.

Silences where things abandon themselves
Kuratoren: Alessio Fransoni, Ilari Valbonesi

Künstler: Giorgio Andreotta Calo, Elisabetta Benassi, Rossella Biscotti, Pierpaolo Campanini, Rä di Martino, Christian Frosi/Diego Perrone, Marzia Migliora, Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio, Elisa Sigichelli, Sissi