Keeping Up With Milano’s Art: May 2023 Issue

Not long time ago – I won’t make names or anything –, somebody I highly respect pronounced a statement without further elaboration saying ‘most political art is bad art’ and that immediately did not sit right with me.

Sure, although I believe art is a powerful tool to spark political dialogue and seek for catharsis from chaos and injustice, some art may come out as quite superficial in its attempt to be political… will you let me the bad guy and say a name? Simon Fujiwara. He is a rising star in the art world and has been exhibited at Giò Marconi gallery here in Milan and in Fondazione Prada last year. Thankfully, I am irrelevant enough in the art system to still freely say when I don’t enjoy a show.

Here you can see an example from the Giò Marconi show, now, Is this good Dada Art? Yes, I guess. I genuinely believe his meta-journey through art history is a fun Dada exercise (they also look good printed on the $110 hoodies from his merchandise…).

But is adding ‘sexuality’, ‘class’ or ‘race’ like they are buzzwords to a pastiche of Pop Art a profound and efficacious political art piece? Well… you tell me since all art newspapers have been praising him for deeply deconstructing identity and contemporaneity that I seem to be the only one who find his works fairly shallow and banal.

Giò Marconi, Simon, if you are reading this - and I’m very sure you never will - don’t take me too seriously, okay? I am just a little pretentious Business&Art kid ;) and the collective was born precisely to be provocative.

Anyways, going back to the 'most political art is bad art’ statement, when I first heard it was when I decided that my next issue of Keeping Up With Milano’s Art would have been fully dedicated to the best, most radical and disruptive political art I could find in town, just to prove them wrong. And yes, I know you are all busy with exam season, but if you feel like a robot studying accounting and micro-economics all day, trust me: go visit the exhibitions I’m going to mention, and you will feel that rage and lump in the throat that will make you feel alive again.

We’re starting from Fondazione ICA, a space in Milan which I love and that I finally get to mention on this format. It is a revitalized industrial building very close to Fondazione Prada. Both externally and internally the spaces were left almost unchanged, I believe the wonderful lighting that fills them up provides all the decoration that is needed. It is an extremely democratic space which charges no entrance fees, and the cultural program always involves cutting-edge contemporary artists. The current exhibition I am inviting you to visit is CONDEMNATION by Aziz Hazara, a very young Afghan artist, curated by Francesca Recchia, journalist, professor (and much more) that I had the chance to interview for this May issue.

What can I say about this exhibition? A full-blown post-structuralist reformulation of ‘Otherness’, and also the first chance I got to see the production of an Afghan artist.

Afghanistan is one of those areas of the world I would define as ‘zones of silence’. It is almost impossible to hear the true voice of Afghanistan without an endless set of mediations from western media or NGOs which in turn makes it structurally impossible for Afghanistan to construct or narrate itself. Through this exhibition the voice and sensibility of Aziz was amplified and heard, and the curatorial work of Francesca shed an insightful light on the extent to which Afghanistan – as most of us know it – is essentially a western construct, molded and tailored to fit a democratizing imperial agenda.

If you read my article on MUDEC’s permanent ethnographic collection you’ll know I am a post-modern at heart. I would deconstruct everything and everyone without a care of whether it is not praxeological enough. We should always question, question, question everything we know. This exhibition is an invitation to the audience to ‘undo’ the performative, inceptual or poietic (call it however you want) power of words and discourses, especially when these manage to turn invasions into liberations… 

…And now, space to the words of Francesca, curator of the exhibition:

Dear professor Recchia, thank you for dedicating some of your time for this interview. First, I was curious if you could give our readers a little anticipation of what the exhibition will be about and who is Aziz Hazara, I believe some interpretative key provided by the curator herself may help our readers decipher his artistic practice more meaningfully.

Aziz Hazara is a multi-media artist originally from Afghanistan and currently based in Berlin. His work focuses on the paradoxes and contradictions of war, on issues of surveillance and on the expendability of non-white lives in the context of international conflicts. Some of these issues are common is our individual research paths and the exhibition pretty much reflects these ethical, artistic and political intersections.

From what I understood, this exhibition is also an endeavor to dismantle some stereotyped narrations that have been constructing our knowledge of Afghanistan in the past decades. Which, in your opinion, are some of the most dangerous ones which contributed to shaping a distorted image of Afghanistan?

The stereotyped narrations of places like Afghanistan are a sort of a mirror that reflects a distorted image of who we are more than a distorted image of Afghanistan. The most difficult thing to dismantle in this sense is the widespread “white saviour complex” that is so profoundly engrained that it becomes difficult to even question. So for however long we – as westerners – believe that we are in charge of rescuing Brown people from themselves, we’ll also continue to reproduce and reify this self-fulfilling prophecy, which is rooted in a distorted image and narration of reality.

Moreover, would you confess us which are the biggest challenges of being a transcultural curator: trying to let such complex experiences – like that of Aziz – resonate within the western institutional framework must be no easy job and I bet it can be tricky to fall into pitiful paternalism.

I believe that if you treat people with respect and as equal irrespective of passport, skin colour or gender orientation the risks of paternalism are reduced by default.

Finally, I’ve come across your The Polis Project , wow, what a fearless and admirable platform, I wanted to take the chance to spread it through our little community and ask you whether the exhibition “Condemnation” at Fondazione ICA is in dialogue with this bigger research project or whether it emerged independently from it.

The Polis Project is both what we (I use the first person plural because we are a collective) are and what we do so it is difficult to draw lines here. However, what needs to be said is also that Condemnation is most of all the result of a decade long exchange and conversation with the artist and this is evident in the exhibition, all the way from the conception to its physical incarnation at ICA. 

The second exhibition I invite you to check out is LASCIA STARE I SOGNI by Yuri Ancarani at PAC, Padiglione d’arte Contemporanea. The exhibition is a summary of 20 years of Yuri’s artistic production in which he developed his career as an intersection between art and cinema. The show consists indeed in a set of video installations that span from very political investigations to pure visual research, pooling from an extremely miscellaneous archive of experiences and memories.

There is one specific video which resonated incredibly with me, it is titled IL POPOLO DELLE DONNE, and I wish all of you could witness it. The entire 45-minute video consists in a monologue by Marina Valcarenghi, a journalist and therapist who worked with prisoners incarcerated for murders and violence against women. Please, take your time to sit and watch it all.

Marina alternates very theoretical discourses with testimonies from prisoners and proposes a very lucid perspective on violence against women. She focuses on the disruptive changes which occurred in the past centuries concerning women rights and role in society concluding from her experience that most hate and violence was caused by fear: men deeply feared the sudden uprise of women. She invites us all to realize that in a few decades a status quo that was perpetuated for centuries was abruptly disrupted and the consequence was terror.

What really surprised me was how she framed all “hate” essentially as a form of fear. It made me think: I am gay, but I never thought about framing the hate I received throughout my life as an expression of fear in first place, a fear of not living up to masculinity expectations or whatever could be at the root of it. Indeed, what was powerful about this video installation was how she discussed about feminism and violence against women transcending the specific contingencies of the topic through a universal vocabulary that I am sure could resonate with every single one of you.

 Well… see how many fertile reflections political art can sparkle? I don’t think most political art is bad art and I genuinely hope not to see art gradually losing its political impulse for the sake of supplying an always more superficial and star-system driven market… with some tokenized race, class and gender thrown here and there.

Instead, I hope to see a growing number of institutions such as ICA being bold enough to offer themselves as platforms for the kind of art I proposed you in this issue. I also hope that more curators like Francesca directed their efforts in helping the audience to access it meaningfully.

Now, good luck for your exams and let’s talk again in June with some new proposals to keep up with Milano’s art!