Trisha Donnelly

The work of the American artist Trisha Donnelly (San Francisco, 1974), investigating the way according to which our thoughts and convictions are formed, explores our experiences, which generally contrast with what we understand as real and with what we think of as imaginary and incessantly crosses the subtle link between sensorial and hypothetical. By focusing on the multiple boundaries and levels of the work and by evoking within the limited and artificial dimension of the institutional formats alternative experiences, which are typically associated with natural or historical events, Donnelly's artistic practice dwells in the interstitial spaces between information that is provided and information that 'flows' and that, while expanding the emotional and cognitive impact of the information itself, becomes part of an unexpected movement of opening and potentiality. No analytical description of Donnelly's show at MAMbo – the artist's first solo exhibition hosted by an Italian museum – can suffice as either its introduction or summary.

Generated on another spatial and temporal level (an audio-video recording of the Baroque Teatro Anatomico at Bologna's Archiginnasio Library), the show ghostly moves toward and beyond its own spatial area and temporal momentum, working as a sort of a TV or radio broadcasting able to intercepts and shifts on other physical and symbolic plans. In keeping with a certain tradition of institutional critique and Conceptual Art, Donnelly is in favour of a purification of the information that surrounds an exhibition, representing, like her works, an event which cannot be fully deciphered, an experience which requires a limited use of mediated means and standardized expectations ("television versions") in exchange for more evocative modalities arising from the intimate spheres of perception, memory, intuition. Within such an approach, Donnelly engages herself into what we can define a possible re-load (re-enchantment) of the space-time dimension of the museum, the exhibition and the corollary institutional world. (Television Version)

Trisha Donnelly

Kurator: Andrea Viliani