Meris Angioletti

Forme-pensiero

From 22 March to 12 May 2018

Wednesday to Saturday

opening hours: 2 pm to 7 pm

(closed 30/31 March and 25 April)

Otto Zoo presents Forme-pensiero, a solo show by Meris Angioletti, from 22 March to 12 May 2018.

The exhibition includes some of Meris Angioletti’s recent works, all characterised by the use of primary elements borrowed from film language (light, projection, text, frame). Each of these aspects is highlighted in the individual works, but detached from the others, in order to create areas of contact and transparency. It is as though the space between the works were filled by their own need to propagate, as traces of their presence on the retina: thought-forms, of emanation and interference. Something will materialise and something will remain invisible.

Arcano II, which refers to the second of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, The High Priestess, is an installation consisting of two tapestries, inspired by historical avant-gardes, in which the elementary forms of one are transmitted to the other like a musical variation, an organic crescendo of organisation and randomness.

The second section of the exhibition presents a series of shadowgraphs (or photogenic drawings in Fox Talbot’s words) titled D-76: photographic images obtained by the simple interposition of objects between the paper and the light source, in which such organic elements as iron filings, crystals, plants, and shells are combined and made to react with the photosensitive surface, with the aim of making emerge their own oxidative reduction, in a process between recognisability and abstraction.

The show is rounded off by an installation with three videos, incomplete records of as many “expanded conferences”, performative transpositions of Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, in which the textual material at the heart of the performance is fragmented and projected into physical and mental space, to the point of disappearing, as happens in these silent videos.

L’anello e il Libro, a performance held in Rome in 2016, is a defective evidence of an imaginary trial of the philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600).

Defective, too, is the documentation of the conference Un re in ascolto, in the form of a film made by superimposing images as a rhythmic-visual answer to the musical score of the original performance. The title is taken from Italo Calvino’s short story of the same name in which the protagonist perceives the world only through hearing, but in her video Meris Angioletti overturns the perspective and once again it is absence, the missing element, that is the real protagonist.

A dancer, whose choreography is inspired by the Sicilian oral tradition of cuntu, evolves in the last video, Cuntu, projected onto an abstract mural drawing; supplied with rods, in his succession of movements he accumulates infinite stories and ways of telling stories, of transmitting information through gesture. By inverting the relationship between performance and documentation, the video becomes the starting point for a further performance which will be enacted on the opening evening.

Meris Angioletti was born in Bergamo in 1977. She lives and works in Paris. After having studied at the Brera Academy and at CFP Bauer, she was artist-in-residence at Le Pavillon- Palais de Tokyo and at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. Among her recent solo shows are L’anneau et le livre, ENSAPC YGREC, Paris; Adagio, (with Flora Moscovici), LaBF15 espace d’art contemporain, Lyons; Le Grand Jeu, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne; Danza macabra, BACO, Bergamo; Golden, Brown and Blue, Gallerie Schleicher/Lange, Berlin; Meris Angioletti, La Galerie – centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-Le-Sec; I describe the Way and meanwhile I am Proceeding along It, Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento; Ginnastica Oculare, GAMeC, Bergamo; Il Paradigma Indiziario, Careof, Milan. Her work was included in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and in the São Paulo Bienal in 2012.

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