Ed Atkins
PRESS RELEASE
Ed Atkins
curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio. Project Manager: Chiara Bertola
Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
Period: September 27, 2016 – January 29, 2017
Inauguration Monday, September 26, 2016, at 8 pm
Ed Atkins
curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Irene Calderoni
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Period: September 27, 2016 – January 29, 2017
Inauguration Monday, September 26, 2016, at 7 pm
Press preview: Monday, September 26, 2016
at 11 am Castello di Rivoli
at 3 pm Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
The Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea inaugurates the solo exhibition of the British artist Ed Atkins (Oxford, 1982) in collaboration with the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The show will be held on the third floor of the Castello di Rivoli and at the Fondazione Sandretto.
The Castello di Rivoli presents the works Even Pricks, 2013, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, 2013, Ribbons, 2014, Hisser, 2015, and Happy Birthday!!!, 2014, in addition to new interventions by the artist. The Fondazione Sandretto will instead host the work Safe Conduct, 2016, with new wall sculpture elements.
One of the most active young artists exploring subjectivity in the digital age, Atkins creates video-installations, performances, and objects in various materials. He also writes texts. His works explore the life of those who are used to spending lots of time “online” in front of their computers. They express the emotions of those who feel suspended between reality and make-believe. Through a “poor” do-it-yourself laptop technique, the experimentation of cutting-edge digital production and editing practices as well as the use of HD video, Atkins’s works salvage the anxiety and autism of the present in order to restore a livable dimension in the folds of reality, between corporality and virtuality.
The retrospective, held in five rooms on the third floor of the Castello, unfolds like a holistic installation through an innovative arrangement of works that join images, space, sound, language, and color into one seamless narrative and allow visitors to have an immersive, hypnotic, and hyper-real experience.
The exhibition aims to reflect upon the combination of tangibility and absence found in the phantasmagoric dimension of the venue: an ancient castle “under a spell,” perhaps inhabited by ghosts, the expression of a material intangibility the artist seems to detect in the reality of HD and digital culture.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev states: “The event’s originality lies in the installation conceived by the artist, which contemplates the emotional, historical, and architectural features of the space where the exhibition unfolds. If the building is a body, then the brain is located at the top floor, in the attic, where Ed Atkins wants to be, the neurologic center of the building-body’s thoughts and emotions. The spacious rooms—formerly used as a military barracks—with their wooden beams on the ceilings and the red brick fireplace’s ascending central column, restore a metaphorical, ancestral place where presence and absence evoke the feeling of a ‘bewitched’ residence poised between the ancient and the contemporary.”
Instead, the contemporary architecture of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hosts the artist’s most recent work, Safe Conduct, 2016, a three-channel video-installation whose images incorporate footage of airports that show travelers the procedure to follow to pass security checks. In addition to the video-installation, Atkins will also present a series of new graphic works related to Safe Conduct. At the Fondazione Sandretto, Christov-Bakargiev adds: “The protagonist gives shape to the anxiety that marks our age of fears and vulnerabilities, but also exaggerated public space control that, although guaranteeing our safety, ends up violating our privacy. The ever-transient confine between something real and something that seems real is one of the artist’s themes as well as a distinctive feature of digital society, where everything is mediated.”
For the exhibition, a catalogue edited by Marianna Vecellio and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev will be published by Skira. This new publication, consisting mainly of a visual novel conceived by Atkins as an artist book, gathers in a unique experience previously unseen images and sources of all his works. Also included are important notes and scripts. This scholarly catalogue, accompanied by a comprehensive timeline and anthology, also offers previously unpublished essays and a vast collection of texts on and by the artist, interviews, and a complete bibliography.
CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Piazza Mafalda di Savoia – 10098 Rivoli (TO)
www.castellodirivoli.org
Hours: from Tuesday to Friday 10 am – 5 pm, Saturday and Sunday 10 am – 7 pm, closed Monday
Tickets: € 6.50 – reduced € 4.50
Press Office Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
Manuela Vasco press@castellodirivoli.org +39.0119565209
International Communications Consultant
Rhiannon Pickles PR rhiannon@picklespr.com + 31.615821202
FONDAZIONE SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO
Via Modane 16 – 10141 Turin
www.fsrr.org
Hours: Thursday 10 am – 11 pm (free admission), Friday, Saturday, and Sunday noon – 7 pm
Tickets: € 5 – reduced € 3
Press Office Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Silvio Salvo silvio.salvo@fsrr.org +39.0113797632