EXHIBITION FOR ONE - A SERIES OF EXHIBITIONS
"This action will not only lead to a reflection on the way the work of art is used, but will also bring new meanings to the works themselves. The home, life, become containers for new visions. The context acts on the work, building its meaning, its history. So a single work is able to tell different stories."
Communication made up of other themes, which go beyond the material value of objects and principles, made up of more abstract, almost unknown concepts, opens up life to new perspectives. Art is a promoter and facilitator of this, and in doing so it brings people together and places them in a network of exchange.
With this expedient we have filled our home with works of art, not only our own but above all those of our colleagues, some of which we have bought, others for which we have exchanged.
The house is a fundamental object for anyone because it protects, facilitates a more comfortable life, provides safety from external agents, and is a symbol of a "normal" life. When works of art are installed in the house, it moves from being a "static" symbol to a "mutant" symbol. It is not only we inside the house who speak, but the works of art also communicate their thoughts. And we, like the house with art, are not static beings, but constantly changing, a chasm of questions for which we try to find answers. And art is well aware of this, since it is made up of objects that are precisely the result of these questions, and to which it attempts to give answers.
When one enters a house-museum, this constant change to which the human being is subject becomes perceptible, as does the beauty of a particular life (that of the owner). The richness of the experience of the house-museum comes from being placed within the network of exchange that is art and collecting.
An example of the house-museum in Italy is the Casa-Museo Antonio Calderara in Vacciago di Ameno (Verbania). "The story of Antonio Calderara and a selection of contemporary artists who were his friends" is the title Calderara gave to his collection, which consists of 327 works by him and by artists linked to him by relationships of friendship and esteem.
Another beautiful example of a true art-life combination is the Asger Jorn House-Museum in Albissola Marina (Savona). In 1954, the Danish painter Asger Jorn visited this house at the invitation of his artist friend Enrico Baj, after which he decided to buy the house in order to transform it into a total art experience. Jorn conceived of art and architecture as an organic whole of space, form and spontaneous, free and vibrant colours capable of improving the lives of people and the community. Ceramics, sculptures, and paintings are installed everywhere throughout the house and garden.
In Albissola, Jorn organises the International Ceramics Meeting in which artists from around the world participate. For this event, the garden of his house becomes a perfect setting to install the many sculptures made at local ceramic factories. The organic forms of nature play a fundamental role for Jorn, because they are what human beings are made of, and nothing can express and communicate this better than art.
My partner and I have shared this conviction for years. We organise and collaborate in residency programmes for artists in Italy and abroad, facilitating a path for this network of communication through art to expand infinitely. offering those who work in it and those who look at it from the outside new views of a life that is always changing and that perhaps can offer answers.
It is in this context that the "Exhibition for One" project was born, not in the form of an artist's residency, but in the form of a participatory project, starting with an interim platform (blog) for the collection of ideas and "artistic operations" and then, as soon as possible, culminating in a series of travelling exhibitions.
It is no coincidence that the ‘Exhibition for One' art project started during the pandemic. For a few months now, we have found ourselves not able to go out, except for essentials. Home is the place where everything happens. Work, private life and imagined life mix. Most of us artists have gone into our studios anyway, locked ourselves in and bolted the shutters. Or some have turned a room in their house into their studio. For reasons of space, the formats of the work are no longer the same. Paper is the material we prefer these days, often plain, ordinary paper. It is the paper that we are most familiar with and that we find easiest to get hold of during this period when the shops are closed. Printing paper, we all have lots and lots of it at home.
Apart from this, what many of us, not only artists, have come to do in this strange and difficult moment is to take better care of ourselves inside and out. We have nourished ourselves not only with good food but also with more or less useful reflections. Eckehard and I have often looked at photos of work done in the past and asked questions or simply commented on them. This made it easier for us to use social networks, where almost every day we posted one of the images from our archive. Dialogues arose from this, precisely because we had more 'time on our hands' during this period, or simply everything went slower.
Friends and colleagues and a few new contacts commented on the images and this often gave rise to new project ideas. This is how the project "Exhibition for One" was born, from the desire of an artist to "own" a collection of drawings by another artist, without money and shipping. At this time when everything is rather unstable and insecure, art is food for the soul, for the eyes, for the mood, the spirit, hope, energy and much more. Possessing the art, or rather the idea of the work, without having it physically there, avoiding shipment (now more uncertain than ever) and the circulation of money, but having it arrive through the shipment of its data, of the photo via the internet.
And so we decided to develop and continue this action of 'virtual collecting' with other international artists. Those who decide to participate are asked to leave three to ten images of their works in a web archive (Dropbox) and to choose in turn to freely interact with the works of one or more artists already present in the archive. The artist will decide whether to simply "take possession" of some of the works, print them out and exhibit them at his or her leisure, for example in his or her private home, the home of friends, a museum, a gallery, a deconsecrated church, in the wood, etc..... and/or make artistic interventions on the chosen works. Whoever requests the images and receives them becomes the owner. "Exhibition for One" thus becomes a series of private exhibitions that are inaugurated and made public through an operation of documentation, together with the story of the individual who installs and owns the exhibition, and of the artists presented through the blog.
Those who decide to participate in the project are not only artists, but anyone among our contacts who would like to virtually own or interact with works by one or more artists. As well as being an artistic project, "Exhibition for One" is also a social operation in that it creates a network of contacts between interested and curious people, makes people talk about themselves and the place where the printed images are installed, and makes them reflect on the narrative form of the works of art and the choice of exhibition method.
In this difficult moment, where we do not know when it will be completely over, with this act we call "of exchange", the reality of countries near and far, with all their history and culture will meet, making possible in a very limited time the circulation of information and images that will be presented in the form of exhibitions. At almost no cost, several people at the same time will be able to benefit from the value of art, take it home and, above all, acquire new knowledge. The work and the biographies of the invited artists, the story of the private individual who has become a gallerist and collector at the same time, and the history of the host location become, through the exhibition, food for all of us—different worlds that meet, sources of new inspiration and perhaps even new lives. This is a new concept of exhibition that eliminates many of the problems associated with the costs of purchasing, renting, shipping and installation and proposes a different location, apart from the museum and gallery, allowing us to reflect on the operation of disseminating an artwork.
The dissemination of the artists' biographies and works takes place not through the marketing strategy of a museum or gallery, but through a wider, more penetrating and more complete circulation of information, which encompasses the culture of the artist’s country, the reality of the exhibitor’s country and their relationship with it and its history, the biography of the exhibitor and their relationship with these artists, etc. This is how art and life mix naturally.
Art and life mix naturally.
Paola Alborghetti