Over the course of the coming autumn-winter, the Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art of Ferrara propose a series of appointments with Italian and foreign artists working in the field of visual arts and live media. The intent is to offer artists an opportunity for experimentation and confrontation, supporting the creation of original productions, and to propose to the public a program that reflects the vitality and richness of some of the paths that distinguish the contemporary art scene, a scene in which the boundaries between different areas of expression are gradually thinning.

Olaf Nicolai

Pour // finir // encore

For his exhibition at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art, German artist Olaf Nicolai presents three specially created installations in which light and sound interact in surprising ways with architecture. These three works take their cues both from Ferrara’s twentieth-century history (the workers’ struggles at the beginning of the century and the “barricades,” the Fascist era, the industrial reconversion after World War II) and from its particular nature as a city reinvented by artists (from De Chirico to Antonioni), an ideal setting on which to project an imaginary plot.

Edited by Stefano Chiodi

Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Sept. 14-Oct. 19

Andrea Belfi / Mirco Santi

Stillivingrooms – Live audio visual set with the collaboration of Veronica Santini

The live performance takes place inside a private house and highlights its dual nature as a passive structure, available to be occupied and transformed by its inhabitants, and an active one, capable of preserving and transmitting traces of the experiences it has hosted. Sounds are produced by the objects in the room and are diffused by a system of small speakers. Images, taken from amateur films, imprinted within the domestic walls between the 1930s and 1970s, are projected on the walls, which are thus multiplied. A trompe l’oeil/trompe la coscience that prompts one to perceive domestic space differently, to renegotiate one’s memories, one’s sensations.

Production support Home Movies, Netmage 08

Private residence (reservation required), Oct. 4-5, from 7 p.m.

Zapruder

Plethora. The Gift

Zapruder filmmakersgroup presents the first track of the project Plethora.

The Gift is a stereoscopic film made using the three-dimensional technique of anaglyph, which gives the image the qualities of bas-relief. Sort of embodied cinema, but also a form of immaterial theater Plethora is an invitation to open our eyes wide to the point of nausea, to consider vision as a tactile tool of perception.

Museo Giovanni Boldini, Oct. 18-31

Sound Dissection II

Eran Sachs / eRikm / Toshimaru Nakamura / Giuseppe Ielasi

After the 2007 edition, the “theater of the sound body” returns to Ferrara with a live performance featuring four protagonists of contemporary electronic music. Israeli sound-artist and curator Eran Sachs offers sounds marked by a visceral, almost brutal use of noise. With a background in visual arts and rock’n’roll, French turntable virtuoso eRikm is able to develop an enthralling energy live. Japanese Toshimaru Nakamura, on the other hand, cultivates physical, musical and emotional stillness, in a word, absence, offering music of imperceptible molecular shifts. Finally, Giuseppe Ielasi, composer and guitarist, explores the limits of electroacoustic music, seeking a balance between abstract tones and house-inspired melodic and rhythmic structures.

Edited by Valerio Tricoli / Xing, presented by Netmage

Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Oct. 31, 7 p.m.

Emanuele Becheri

Time out of joint

Emanuele Becheri’s new project, Time out of joint, expresses the need to confront a question at first glance insoluble: how is it possible to show the duration, the persistence of time once it has irretrievably passed? Starting from this question, the artist proposes a reflection on the idea of trace, lapsus, missed inscription, and, last but not least, time. What comes to light is only a hint, the possibility of intuiting an unexpected manifestation of the object of vision, in tension between birth and dissolution.

Edited by Maria Luisa Pacelli

Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Nov. 30-Dec. 28

Andreas Golinski

It was a long way down

Andreas Golinski proposes a reflection on the coercive models of coexistence and work imposed by the postindustrial and globalized economy. His installations, in which the metaphor of the industrial cog recurs, subject the viewer to perceptual experiences that provoke bewilderment, through obligatory and sometimes misleading paths, monumental barricades made by assembling steel mill tools and dramatic light effects that cleave the darkness revealing unexpected forms, as is the case with It was a long way down site-specific production conceived on the occasion of this exhibition

Edited by Andrea Lissoni / Xing

Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Nov. 30-Dec. 28

Kinkaleri

Some days are better than others. Ghosts from Romeo and Juliet

Kinkaleri seems to want to break any residual ties with traditional theatrical practice, an act of courage that places at the center of this phase of the group’s research the desire to get rid of an identity ballast felt to some extent exhausted, in order to point to different poetic urgencies. “Theater” appears only as a citation in the performers’ ghostly “costume,” in their lopsided and wild “choreography,” in the “pieties” created in those few moments when the show allows itself an aesthetic break.

Ferrara Municipal Theater and Xing

Ferrara Municipal Theater, Dec. 10, 9 p.m.

Visual. Photographic gaze

In Visual. Photographic gaze , works by AMAE, Alessio Bogani, Giulia Bonora, Roberta Cavallari, Elisa Leonini, Silvia Sartori, Floriana Savarino, and Simone Settimo offer a reflection on the different ways in which photography has been enjoyed and how it has changed the way we look.

Curated by Yoruba Association with Young Artists Office of the City of Ferrarta and Civic Museums of Ancient Art

House of Ludovico Ariosto, December 13, 2008 – January 24, 2009

Edited by.

Maria Luisa Pacelli, Daniele Gasparinetti and Silvia Fanti

Organizers

Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Ferrara in collaboration with Xing, with the support of Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri – Dipartimento per le Politiche Giovanili e Attività Sportive, ANCI and GAI