An exhibition in cooperation with the Embassy of Italy and the Embassy of Austria in Türkiye

Artists

Başak Altın, Antonella Anselmo, Flavia Bigi, Songül Boyraz, Cristina Calderoni, Chiara Campanile, Ilaria Carli Paris, Casaluce-Geiger, Pablo Chiereghin, Tom Eller, Luca Faccio, Karin Ferrari,  Christina Fiorenza, Julia Frank, Gianmaria Gava, Michela Ghisetti, Chiara Giorgetti,

Siggi Hofer,  Brigitte Mahlknecht, Pınar Öğrenci, Klaus Pobitzer (aka Felix Grütsch), Lucia Riccelli, Linus Riepler, Gabriele Rothemann, Ryts Monet, Franziska Schink, Eva Schlegel, Luca Sposato, Esther Stocker, Alberto Storari, Nazım Ünal Yilmaz, Federico Vecchi, and Erwin Wurm

Curated by Marcello Farabegoli

Co-curators: Charlotte Aurich & Pablo Chiereghin

What does it mean to direct one’s gaze elsewhere? The group exhibition “Looking Elsewhere Being There” explores the concept of movement as an intrinsic element of place. Initiated by the Embassy of Italy in  Türkiye in collaboration with Marcello Farabegoli Projects and the CerModern Arts Center in Ankara, it illuminates artistic practices that cross borders and engages with movement as it relates to place, emphasising transformation, transition, and translation. Being somewhere inherently involves positioning and orientation: From what vantage point do we perceive a place? How do we situate ourself within the web of relationships? As a complex weave of political, cultural, and material histories, this idea of place demands innovative narratives and methods of inquiry to explore its contours and boundaries. By bringing together artistic practices that have evolved from this mode of movement, the group show aims to uncover the surprising connections and images that constitute spatial and social relations, offering space for perspectives of looking, moving, and being elsewhere.

The exhibition, organised in cooperation with the Embassy of Italy and Embassy of Austria in Türkiye and supported by the Austrian Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, is curated by Marcello Farabegoli and co-curated by Charlotte Aurich and Pablo Chiereghin.

First of all, let’s look at the title of the exhibition, “Looking Elsewhere Being There”, which deliberately sounds somewhat enigmatic.

What does it mean to look elsewhere? The concept of elsewhere somehow expresses a break between the current space – geographical, social, cultural, emotional etc. – and all that it is not. Furthermore, elsewhere seems to go beyond the subjective presence and its network in society, becoming a kind of reminding presence of possible other scenarios and existences. It offers a coexistence of diverse self and others, a series of possible worlds, which manifest realities that are not the ones we are living in.

To be a little more specific when we look somewhere else, for example because we want or have to move there, we would expect that we are actually in a specific place, in the here and now, so to speak – for this reason in the second part of the title we might write “Being Here”. In contrast to this, “Being There” indicates that we are still somewhere else, perhaps facing in a completely different direction to what we are looking for. Or we see ourselves from the outside, i.e. that we are already “travelling” with our consciousness to our imaginary destination.

And what is the relation to being somewhere? Being somewhere always entails a moment of positioning and mapping: From what position do we look at a place? Where do we place ourselves in the net of relations?

In this sense, the group show sets off with the idea of movement as constituent element of place: it is set in a net of relations between other places and its agents. As an entangled knot of political, cultural and material histories this idea of place calls for innovative narratives and modes of questioning in order to trace its lines and fringes. The exhibition project therefore looks at artists who deal with forms of movements in relation to a place in the sense of transformation, transition and translation. No wonder then that most of the participating artists from Italy, Austria and Türkiye, do not live in their countries of origin or are very often on the move.

Another peculiar aspect of the exhibition is that most of the artists live in Vienna. This is not a choice but rather an initial condition due to the past of the exhibition’s initiators. Yet what more fertile ground could have been found than Vienna, which is also historically closely linked to Italy and Türkiye?  In addition, the aspects and stories of migration can be found in the bits and pieces which form the togetherness of the city: in the line of a migration law, in tags on the city’s walls, through personal items that talk of life stories, or images and terms in the collective memory. What imaginaries of a city and its practices, however scattered or fragmented, can translate the ongoing dialogue between people and their relation to the place?

Finally, an important element of the exhibition is the idea of relational places and transport, which introduces a gesture of opening, an allowance to move on in other ways. What do we take with us on the way? The figure of transport opens other models of thinking about the state of being somewhere. Taking something from one place to the other asks about the moment of translation and transition and brings the process of movement into focus. The transported element introduces the idea of a messenger and its specific power of building a bridge between seemingly far away contexts.

Originally the artists were asked to lend works of art that in principle fitted in a metaphorical suitcase or bag, in other words, to contribute works whose size and materiality reflected the state of being handled when on the move. This fact fits very well with the idea of a carrier bag as the author Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her 1986 essay in regard to fiction. Contrasting to explain culture as originated by the figure of heroes, who have to conquer the other using “long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing”, Le Guin offers the carrier bag as a means of transport for the bits and pieces that form a story. The bag entails being able to pick up useful, edible or beautiful things, to let them move upside down in the bag while walking, to look at them one by one, to share and consume and give them away again. The metaphorical carrier bag or suitcase thus becomes a metaphor itself: they are associated with travel in general, with vacations or doing business, but can also be related to fleeing from the horrors of persecution and war, and stand out as a symbol of collecting and preserving, which opposes that of breaking up and destroying and becomes a memorial of peace.

By bringing together different artistic practices that have mainly evolved from the mode of moving elsewhere and its inclinations, the show “Looking Elsewhere and Being There” aims at the surprising connections and images that constitute these spatial and social relations. Rather than their being tied to an idea of city walls or nation state, the show gives space to works of art that open up the perspective of moving and being elsewhere.

Of course, the exhibition is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to all the questions mentioned above, but through the many “art fragments” on display, it will hopefully provide possible approaches to find answers or even raise further questions that develop fractally like numerous new branches from a lush tree full of different innards and life.

         Charlotte Aurich, Pablo Chiereghin and Marcello Farabegoli

Concluding remarks

From 2014 to 2017, I curated a series of contemporary art exhibitions on behalf of Ambassador Giorgio Marrapodi at the Metternich Palace, the seat of the Embassy of Italy in Vienna. Among the artists I presented then were Pablo Chiereghin, Gianmaria Gava and Esther Stocker, who are also present in the exhibition “Looking Elsewhere Being There”.

In the meantime, ambassador Marrapodi has been appointed to Türkiye. I had already been in contact with him for some time concerning an exhibition at the CerModern Arts Center in Ankara. What a nice surprise then to receive confirmation from the Embassy of Italy in Türkiye in spring 2024 that I could curate the exhibition. Due to the tight schedule, I decided to invite mainly artists with whom I had already worked in the past or with whom I was already in contact with a view to future exhibitions. As at the beginning of this adventure I was not sure if I would be able to find additional funds to afford the expensive transport of art, I decided to ask the artists to lend us relatively small, easily transportable works, which in principle fitted into one suitcase. So the idea was born in my mind to set up the exhibition with numerous small-format works, leaving them to emerge like so many fragments of a large mosaic in the imposing exhibition space of CerModern’s Güney Hangar gallery. Going against the trend of large formats and placing lots of small works in a quite huge space challenged me, even if some exceptions came up when defining the works to be exhibited. Together with Charlotte Aurich and Pablo Chiereghin, who assist me as co-curators, we then forged a concept mouldable to the wide constellation of artists – more than thirty – that I had in mind to invite. As this is an exhibition organised mainly together with the Embassy of Italy, we naturally concentrated on Italian artists – there are many in Vienna and the surrounding area, such as those mentioned above, but also Antonella Anselmo, Chiara Campanile, Ilaria Carli Paris, Casaluce-Geiger, Tom Eller, Luca Faccio, Karin Ferrari, Christina Fiorenza, Julia Frank, Michela Ghisetti, Siggi Hofer, Brigitte Mahlknecht, Klaus Pobitzer (aka Felix Grütsch), Lucia Riccelli, Gabriele Rothemann (a German and Italian citizen), Ryts Monet, Franziska Schink, Alberto Storari and Federico Vecchi, many of them from South Tyrol where I grew up. The rather large number of Italian artists living in Vienna shown in  this exhibition thus also provides a good insight into the diversity,  quality and creativity of this heterogeneous group. Further, a small selection of artists living in Italy but for various reasons linked to Vienna, such as Flavia Bigi, Cristina Calderoni, Chiara Giorgetti and Luca Sposato. Then we also decided to ask some Austrian artists whom we greatly appreciate, such as Linus Riepler, Eva Schlegel and Erwin Wurm to participate in the exhibition – Schlegel and Wurm are leading artists in Austria and very well known worldwide. And finally, I am very happy that we were also able to bring some renowned Turkish artists, partly living in Vienna and Berlin, to the exhibition, namely Başak Altın, Songül Boyraz, Pınar Öğrenci and Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, thus uniting the three countries involved in this exciting project on an artistic level.

Marcello Farabegoli