Sculptures and Places
Tortolì
September, 24––>26 / 2022
An international symposium exploring the role and relevance of sculpture today
CONTEMPORANEA is the new project of Fondazione di Sardegna dedicated to the creativity of the present, within the frame of the AR/S – Shared Art in Sardinia program, directed by Franco Carta. Through meetings, seminars, workshops and exhibitions, CONTEMPORANEA aims to offer opportunities for training, specialization, networking and professional growth to new generations of artists, curators and professionals of the visual arts. Sculptures and Places, curated by Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda, is the first project of 2022: an international symposium which will see protagonists of the art world gather from the 24th to the 26th of September in Tortolì, a village by the sea in Ogliastra, to discuss the role and importance of sculpture in contemporary practices and its relationship with nature, the built environment and the public sphere. The symposium includes lectures, workshops, and social and leisure activities. Young artists, curators and students are invited to apply. In the evening the talks will be open to the public.
Speakers
Kathy Alliou has been heading the department of Museum at les Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2013. With her team, she coordinates and contribute to its exhibition program and to the promotion of its collections. It is thanks to the artists that she strives to think, to write and to invent dialogues with contemporary artworks as well as historical ones. She deploys a repertory of artistic projects ranging from curating exhibitions, research residencies, and all projects based on speech, on the performative potential of bodies, the transmission and circulation of thought: symposium, seminars, talks and programs of performances. In 2022 she was named jury of Eric&Isabelle Pujade-Lauraine Art Prize between Italy and France, and appointed Artistic Director of Asia Now 2022 which will celebrate its 8th edition at the wonderful heritage site of la Monnaie de Paris, during Paris + par Art Basel from October 20/23 2022.
Art historian and curator, she is associate professor of Contemporary Art History and Rectoral Delegate for Museums at the University of Sassari, she is president of the Nivola Foundation, Orani, Sardinia. She wrote extensively on Early Century Italian Art and Mid-Century Modernism, and the role of the decorative in Western art and culture, giving lectures on these topics at several international universities and institutions. She curated around a hundred exhibitions on XX century and contemporary art.
Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1971. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 1984. Baghramian’s work comprises sculpture and installation often in reference to architecture and the human body. Her work addresses temporal, spatial and social relationships to language, history, and the present, with forms which materialize in response to contextual conditions or the premises of a given medium. These structures offer the possibility of an open and discursive dialogue in response to a site, or a freeing of the assigned relationship between an object and its meaning. Recent solo shows include those at Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM), Milan, Italy (2021); MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2019); Palacio de Cristal, Madrid, Spain (2018); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017). She has participated in the Yorkshire Sculpture International at The Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2019); Venice Biennale, Italy (2019 and 2011); Skulptur Projekt Munster, Germany (2017 and 2007); the 8th and 5th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2014 and 2008); and Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Scotland (2012). Baghramian is the 2022 Nasher Prize Laureate.
Massimo Bray, general director of Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, was deputy in the Italian Parliament and minister for heritage, cultural activities and tourism (2013-2014). Chief editor of the magazine published by the Italianieuropei Foundation, he was president of the La Notte della Taranta foundation. For the Italian edition of Huffington Post he is the author of a blog dedicated to culture, with particular attention to traditional and digital publishing. As president of the Foundation for books, music and culture, he was responsible for the 2017 and 2018 editions of the Turin International Book Fair. Since 2019 he has been teaching History of Publishing at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples and from 2020 to 2021 he was Councilor for Culture of the Puglia Region.
André Buchmann is a gallerist for international contemporary art. Trained at his parents’ gallery in Switzerland and at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York in the early Nineties, he founded the Buchmann Galerie in Germany in 1995, setting up in premises in Cologne. Since 2005 the gallery has been located in Berlin where it has two centrally located exhibition spaces. André Buchmann has been a member of the board of the Cragg Foundation, Wuppertal.
After studying Advertising at the School of Arts and Crafts and later Fine Art at the School of Fine Arts (both Valencia), Carmen Calvo settled in Madrid between 1983 and 1985 and then in Paris, where she remained until 1992. Since then, she has lived and worked in Valencia. Although her work is Conceptual, it is also linked to Surrealism and Pop art, with a production that includes sculpture, objects, installation, painting, ceramics and photography.
She represented Spain, together with Joan Brossa, at the Spanish pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1997. She has exhibited in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Her exhibitions include IVAM, Valencia (1990 and 2007); Museum of Modern Art, Mexico (1998); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Ímber, Caracas (1999); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2002); Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman (2005); and Sala Kubo Kutxa, San Sebastián (2020).
She is the recipient of the 2022 Julio González Prize,and her multi-media work from the 1960s to today is currently featured in a monographic exhibition at the IVAM Centre Julio González.
Antonella Camarda is assistant professor in Museology, History of Artistic Critique and Conservation at the University of Sassari, where she teaches Museum Studies, Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art and Anthropology at the University of Sassari and a post-graduate degree in Psychology and Museum Studies at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Her research focus is on post-war Modernism, the cultural relationships between Italy and the U.S., and the role of museums in the reception of contemporary art.
Director of Museo Nivola in Orani from 2015 to 2022, she curated several exhibitions and cultural projects and is currently responsable for the cultural programme of the DCN – Nuorese Cultural District.
Mary Ellen Carroll is a conceptual artist living and working in New York City. Her work inhabits the disciplines of architecture/design, film, writing, performance, and technology. Carroll received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards. Her work has been exhibited in numerous public and private collections including The Whitney Museum (NY), ICA (Philadelphia/London), and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (IL).
After a long period working for a Public Administration he became a manager of the Fondazione di Sardegna where he is coordinating the area of the artistic and real estate assets. Since 2015 is coordinating the project ARS/Arte condivisa in Sardegna, a platform where public institutions and private subjects cooperate with the Fondazione di Sardegna to set up exhibition projects, original productions in the area of performative and visual arts, public meetings, publications aimed at incentivating public art in the territory of Sardinia.
Luca Cheri has been director of the Nivola Museum since 2022 and in charge of public programs since 2015. PhD in History, Literature and Cultures of the Mediterranean, Cheri has curated numerous events, with a range of activities ranging from concerts to theatrical performances, to social agriculture, to exhibitions. He is responsible for cultural sector of the Municipality of Sarule and coordinator of the Cultura al centro network, a project which reunites public bodies, private institutions and associations in the Nuorese area.
After graduating in Contemporary History at the Bologna University and earning a MA in management of Cultural Heritage at the Politecnico in Turin, Nerina Ciaccia (Foggia 1981) collaborated with the collective a.titolo in various public art projects. In 2013, jointly with Antoine Levi, she set up the Ciaccia Levi Gallery, based in Paris and Milan. She is co-founder of the Paris Internationale fair and of the collaborative project Palai in Lecce.
Martin Engler, head of Contemporary Art at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, from 2008 to 2022, worked as an independent curator, author, and critic since 1996. He has been lecturing at German and European universities and academies since 1997, most recently at Goethe University and Städelschule, in Frankfurt on the Main, and University Bern, Switzerland. From 2002 to 2008 he was a curator at the Kunstverein Hannover. Aside from publishing on such subjects as avant-garde theory, the interrelation of painting and photography, figurative painting in the 1980s, and the photography of the Becher class, he has authored monographic catalogs and published on (amongst others) John Armleder, John Baldessari, Leigh Bowery, Donald Judd, Piero Manzoni, Adrian Paci, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Peter Roehr, Victor Vasarely, and Corinne Wasmuht.
Luigi Fassi is artistic director of the Artissima art fair in Turin, after being director of MAN, Nuoro (2018-2022), curator at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria (2012-2017), and director of Kunstverein ar/ge kunst in Bolzano (2009-2017). A Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum ISP of New York (2008-09), he has organized exhibitions for various institutions on an international level. In 2016 he was a fellow of the Artist Research Trip programme in Tel Aviv, Israel, co-curator of the festival Curated_by in Vienna, Austria, and of the 16th edition of the Quadriennale of Rome. He has been a member of the selection committee of the Artorama contemporary art fair in Marseille (2019-2022), and curator of the project Tomorrows/Today at the Cape Town Art Fair in South Africa (2019-2022). An author of many books, he contributed to Artforum, Mousse, Flash Art, Camera Austria, Site and Domus.
Art historian and art critic, Chiara Gatti is the director of the MAN museum in Nuoro, Sardinia. Since twenty years she has been a contributor to the cultural pages of La Repubblica, Robinson, il Venerdì. A member of the scientific committee of Museo di Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona (CH) and a consultant for Monte Verità, Ascona (CH), she curated the museum project for Palazzo Verbania, Luino (VA), including the opening to the public of Vittorio Sereni’s archive. She taught courses at Università Cattolica, at Università dell’Insubria, at Accademia di Venezia, and she collaborates with the Palermo university in research and teaching activities. She is currently working at a research project for the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She curated exhibitions at GAMeC, Bergamo, Museo Novecento, Florence, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Museo Archeologico Regionale, Aosta, Pinacothèque, Parigi, Villa Panza, Varese.
For the MAN in Nuoro she curated the exhibitions Giacometti e l’arcaico and L’elica e la luce. Le futuriste 1912-1944. With Lea Vergine she wrote L’arte non è faccenda di persone perbene, published by Rizzoli in 2016.
Mark Gisbourne is an international curator and art writer. Born in the UK, he lives and works in Berlin. A former twice President of the British Art Critics Association (AICA), he has been the curator of the International Rohkunstbau summer exhibitions from 2004 to 2020. A writer of a dozen or so books, and major museum publications, three hundred catalog essays, as well as numerous critical articles and reviews. His recent projects include an extensive exhibition of German art since the 1960s, Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandschaften, National Museum of Latvia in Riga (2016), B.A.R.O.C.K., at Schloss Caputh, Potsdam and the ME Collection, Berlin; The Leipzig Connection, in HDLU, Kunsthalle of the Artist Associations, Zagreb, Croatia, 2019. Among his most recent publications, Dissonance – Platform Germany, DCV Books, 2022, co-authored with Christoph Tannert.
Conceptual artist and painter – but also poet, writer, playwright and director – Emilio Isgrò (Barcellona di Sicilia, 1937) is one of the best known and most prestigious names in Italian art at an international level. Isgrò created one of the most revolutionary and original works in the context of the so-called second avant-gardes of the 1960s, which earned him several participations in the Venice Biennale (1972, 1978, 1986, 1993) and the first prize at the Biennale. of San Paolo (1977), as well as other important exhibitions at the MoMA in New York in 1992 and at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice in 1994 and the anthologies at the Pecci Museum in Prato in 2008, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 2013, at Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2016 and at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice in 2019. Initiator of the “erasures” of texts, applied on encyclopedias, manuscripts, books, maps and even on cinematographic films, Isgrò has made this practice the pivot of all his research. His works are part of prestigious public and private institutions in Italy and abroad.
Her professional history in the publishing world starts in the Coeditions and Foreign Copyrights office of a small Florentine publishing house, and continues in the role of Responsible for Special Projects and Foreign development at Skira, Milan. In 2017 she is asked to run the International Publications at the historic Swiss publishing house Scheidegger & Spiess, with the task of scouting new projects and leading the whole process of conception and production of art, design and photography catalogues. She currently collaborates with artists, museums and galleries in coordinating and running publishing projects, and is responsible for Foreign Relations and Development at O.G.M. Spa.
Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak), an exhibition maker, writer and educator based in Berlin and New York, runs jointly with Lennart Wolff the curatorial and artists project km temporaer. In her practice, she is concerned with politics of self-organization, representation and collectivity. A graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Curatorial Program, she is currently doing her PhD in philosophy with Marina Gržinić at AdbK Vienna and holds the interim professorship of the chair of Art Theory and Mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. Linn has worked with The Kitchen, South London Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the National Gallery Prague among others. She has contributed to publications and magazines such as Frieze, Starship, artforum, Texte zur Kunst, BOMB, and Jacobin.
Lucrezia Longobardi (1991) is an art critic and curator. Her research focusses on the concept of space, seen as existential circumstance, from an intimate as well as community and social angle. She writes on art magazines and collaborated with private foundations, Italian cultural institutes and museums, among them Fondazione Morra, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and MADRE museum in Naples. She is the author of Lo spazio esistenziale. Definizioni e corollari. Vol.1 (Iemme edizioni, 2021) and 15 ipotesi per una storia dell’arte contemporanea. Appunti per una nuova lettura del XXI secolo (Castelvecchi, 2022).
Camilla Mattola is an independent curator and a Ph.D. candidate in museology and contemporary art at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sassari.
Her research interests include art history, textile art, postcolonial, social, and anthropological studies. In her Ph.D. thesis, she deals with the musealization of controversial heritage, analyzing the case of the Asinara Island’s museum.
In 2019 she worked for Museo Nivola in Orani, researching the sculptures of Costantino Nivola for the forthcoming catalog raisonné. In 2020 she took part in the multidisciplinary research project “Italy – US. More than a Friendship”, on the reception of Italian art in the United States after World War II, funded by the Regional Government of Sardinia.
She also writes for art journals and magazines.
Ruth Noack, an art historian, writer, teacher and exhibition maker, became known to the global art world as curator of documenta 12. Between 2019 and 2022, she acted as Executive Director and Curator of The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C., where she produced the exhibitions The Mental Body, on aesthetic acts of self-creation and self-care, Stay Alive to Life, on resilience in times of COVID, See You There, on making history at Whitman-Walker and When We First Arrived…, an exhibition which amplified testimonies of children detained at the US-Mexico border through the works of 123 visual artists (in collaboration with DYKWTCA). Noack’s cycle of sketch exhibitions Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life was shown in Athens, Prag, Beijing and, in its most recent iteration, at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2019/20). Leader of a Roaming Academy at the Dutch Art Institute (2015-19) and Head of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College in London (2012/2013), Noack has taught at universities and academies for more than 20 years. She has also given lectures frequently, widely and internationally. She has authored a monograph on Sanja Iveković and edited Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis. Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind (2013). Her essays on Eva Hesse, Mary Kelly, Mary Ellen Carroll, Roger Hjorns, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Anna Daučíková, Maria Bartuszová, Alejandra Riera, Danica Dakić, George Osodi a.o. have been published in cataloges and journals, such as Afterall and Camera Austria. In 2002/3, she served as President of the Austrian AICA.
Born in Albania, he lives in Milan. He is an artist who works at the crossroads between photography, video, sculpture, drawing, performance. He had solo shows in many international instituions, among them: Kunsthalle, Krems (2019); National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2019); Museo del Novecento, Florence (2017); MAC, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2014); PAC, Milan (2014); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); National Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtina (2012); Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2010); Bloomberg Space, London (2010); The Center for Contemporary Art – CCA, Tel Aviv (2009); Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (2007); MoMA PS1, New York (2006) and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005). He participated into the Biennale di Venezia (1999, 2005) and the Biennale di Venezia Architettura (2014); in the Sydney Biennale (2006); in the Quadriennale, where he was awarded the first prize (2008); in the Biennale de Lyon (2009) and in the Thessaloniki Biennale (2013). He has work in important collections, such as Metropolitan Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; MAXXI, Rome; Fundacio Caixa, Barcelona; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich; UBS Art Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; New York Public Library, New York; Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle.
Bettina Pousttchi is an artist predominantly working with sculpture and photography. Born in Mainz and based in Berlin, she studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Her site-specific photo installations consistently challenge and expand the formal and conceptual possibilities of photography and often occupy entire building façades. One of Germany’s foremost contemporary artists, she has also received significant recognition internationally, especially in the USA, where solo exhibitions of her work have been held in institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Arts Club of Chicago.
Pedro Reyes has won international attention for large-scale projects that address current social and political issues. Through a varied practice utilising sculpture, performance, video, and activism, Reyes explores the power of individual and collective organisation to incite change through communication, creativity, happiness, and humour. A socio-political critique of contemporary gun culture is addressed in Reyes’s Palas por Pistolas (2008), in which the artist worked with local authorities in Culiacán, Mexico, to melt down guns into shovels, intended to plant trees in cities elsewhere in the world. Similarly, in Disarm (2013) the Mexican government donated over 6,700 confiscated firearms for Reyes to transform into mechanical musical instruments, which are automated to play a delightful, if surreal loop, retaining the raw emotion of their origination. Issues of community and compassion are addressed in Sanatorium, activated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011, dOCUMENTA (13) in Germany in 2012, and in 2014 at The Power Plant in Toronto and The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. In this work, visitors are invited to sign up for a ‘temporary clinic,’ with the mission of treating various kinds of urban malaise. His immersive exhibition Doomocracy, organised by Creative Time at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, was a ‘political house of horrors’ marking the confluence of two events haunting the American cultural imagination at the time: Halloween and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Gian Maria Tosatti is an artist and journalist based in Naples. Trained in the performative field, between 2008 and 2018 he lived and worked in New York. His work consists mainly of large site-specific installations, conceived for entire buildings or urban areas. He has exhibited at the Hessel Museum in New York (2014), the MADRE in Naples (2016), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York (2011), the National Gallery in Rome (2017, 2018), the Petah Tikva Museum of Art (2017), the Archaeological Museum in Salerno (2014), the American Academy in Rome (2013), the Villa Croce Museum in Genoa (2012), the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (2008), the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (2009), the Centrale Montemartini, Rome (2007), the Wilfredo Lam Museum, Havana (2015), Casa Testori in Milan (2014), the MAAM in Rome and Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples. Since 2021 he has been artistic director of the Quadriennale di Roma.In 2022 he is the only artist in the Italian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Lennart Wolff is an architect and curator based in Berlin. He graduated from the Architectural As- sociation, London. In 2018 he co-founded the AA Visiting School Zurich. He has written for maga- zines like frieze, Kaleidoscope and Cura. Lennart Wolff conceptualizes, organizes, and produces exhibitions, texts, architectural designs, and objects in shifting collaborative constellations.
Programme
9 AM / Transfer to Orani for the opening of the exhibition Pedro Reyes, Zero Armi Nucleari, Museo Nivola
10:30 AM / Opening of the exhibition Pedro Reyes, Zero Armi Nucleari – Orani, Museo Nivola
5 PM / Franco Carta Welcome address / Giuliana Altea Preliminary remarks
5:30 – 7 PM / Nerina Ciaccia and Luigi Fassi
7 – 8:30 PM / Bettina Pousttchi and Kathy Alliou
8:30 – 10 PM / Pedro Reyes and Luca Cheri
9:30 AM / Antonella Camarda, Introduction to the second day
11:30 AM – 1 PM / André Buchmann
5:30 – 7 PM / Adrian Paci and Martin Engler
7 – 8:30 PM / Carmen Calvo and Mark Gisbourne
8:30 – 10 PM / Mary Ellen Carroll and Ruth Noack
9:30 – 10 AM / Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda Introduction to the third day
10 – 11:30 AM / Elisa Linn and Lennart Wolff
11:30 AM – 1 PM / Nairy Baghramian, Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda
5:30 – 7 PM / Emilio Isgrò and Chiara Gatti
7 – 8:30 PM / Massimo Bray and Giuseppina Leone
8:30 – 10 PM / Gian Maria Tosatti and Lucrezia Longobardi
The venue
Tortolì is one of the main centers of Ogliastra, an area of Sardinia famous for its unspoiled nature, natural monuments, woods and beaches. Rich in evidence of the Nuragic age with more than 200 archaeological sites, and land of centenarians that attracted the attention of scientists from all over the world, Ogliastra is also a land open to contemporary art and experimentation. Tortolì was the site in the 1990s of a public sculpture project, Su Logu de S’Iscultura, curated by Edoardo Manzoni, which saw the area enriched with a significant series of environmental works. In Ogliastra there are the Stazione dell’Arte (Ulassai) and the Maria Lai Archive (Lanusei), dedicated to the Sardinian artist originally from Ulassai, and not far from it are the two main centers of contemporary art in Sardinia, the Museo Nivola in Orani and the Museo MAN of Nuoro.
Open Call 2022
Sculptures and Places is an intensive cycle of three days, including lectures and workshops in the morning, public talks and social and leisure activities in the afternoon. Conversations and discussions play an important role to ensure participation and exchange of ideas. The symposium welcomes participants from all over the world, to create a multicultural and vibrant environment. All the meetings are in English if not specified otherwise.
On the morning of the 24th, the participants will be transfered to Museo Nivola in Orani to attend the opening of the exhibition Pedro Reyes: Zero Armi Nucleari.
Set on the eastern shores of Sardinia, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Tortolì is the perfect starting point to explore the rich cultural heritage of the island and the wild, beautiful nature of woods and beaches.
During the week the participants will
– Acquire knowledge of the art world to professionally operate in it.
– Create or strengthen a network of relationships among young artists, curators and museum professionals.
– Discover and enjoy Sardinia in the most beautiful time of the year.
Target group
Post-graduate art and humanities students, artists, curators, critics, and museum professionals. The course will host 10 to 15 participants. Application from undergraduate students will be considered discretionally. The selection process will promote gender and cultural diversity.
Fee and benefits
The symposium is generously funded by Fondazione di Sardegna, and attendance is free to all the participants.
Scholarships and certificates of attendance
10 scholarships to cover accomodation and living costs will be awarded by the organisatio on the basis of the cvs and motivation letter. 5 scholarships are reserved to applicants born or living in Sardinia.
Travel costs are borne by the participants.
After the end of the symposium, each participant will receive a certificate of attendance. The students of the University of Sassari, Department of Scienze Umanistiche e Sociali can claim 2 CFU for complementary learning activities).
Not later than 31/08/2022!
Organized by
