Place for the Self / Amnon Barzel

This exhibition is about the meaning of a home, and a home within our own selves. A home where existential reflections and anxieties are accumulated through the dramatic events which characterize recent times.

Micha Ullman has created a home deep in the earth as a shelter for the self, while Vito Acconci addresses the self-in-body protected by the skeleton in World in your Bones. Barbara Bloom defines her Mood Ring Home as a "tool for reflection" and as a "house that talks back, a house which constantly raises questions." Architect and artist Zvi Hecker combines the need for poetry and precision in his Spiral Home, a contemporary Tower of Babel—the archaic model of multiculturalism—where all languages are integrated to create one whole.

The ascetic room installation of Vittorio Messina, with its video projection of dream-like images, is accompanied by his words, "A home is done from the measures of his space, and the events of his past." The works of Polish artist Krzysztof Bednarski and the young Albanian artist Anila Rubiku refer to issues of identity and memory in our era of displacement, in which people and their cultures are moving from south to north and east to west. Their search for the essence of the self within political and cultural situations brings to mind the influential thinker of the middle ages Hugues De Saint-Victor who said, "Perfect is the one for whom the whole world is like a land of exile."

Amnon Barzel is a curator based in Rome, Italy and is Founding Director of the Pecci Museum of Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy and former Director of the Jewish Museum, Berlin.

Pressetext

Place for the Self
kuratiert von Amnon Barzel

mit Vito Acconci, Krzysztof Bednarski, Barbara Bloom, Zvi Hecker, Vittorio Messina, Anila Rubiku, Micha Ullman