Opened at the end of November 27, the Porta Portese group show ends the exhibition program of the current year, scheduled by the artist-run space SPAZIOMENSA in Rome. The event, as enclosed in the name, develops from a thinking concerning the nature of the market, on the basis of a project firmly connected to the city of Rome, place where the bigger part of the authors proposed live. Indeed, the exhibition, curated by Gaia Bobò, makes use of the category of the market as a place of transmission and transit of objects and images, a crossroads of different geographical and chronological coordinates; a sort of evanescent cultural space, recursively performed by people walking through it, accentuating the ritual and irrational dimension that has determined the magnetism of this social practice over the time. So, the exhibition creates a sort of acceleration of the praxis of the exchange processes between one aesthetic and another, proposing a suggestion on the cultural, social and anthropological dynamics connected to the device represented by the market as a place of sharing and discovery. In the show, this feature is reflected in the mix of languages and techniques belonging to many artists different in style and path. All of this, providing a spectrum of the many solutions of contemporary artistic practice, is divided into three sections, each corresponding to a different phase of the exhibition, where works by emerging and established artists coexist.

The first area, called Group show, with the works set up on long horizontal parallel tables, almost reminding the ways of showcasing the goods in a market, hosts artworks by Tomaso Binga, Lucia Cristiani, Auriea Harvey, Jonas Lund, Giulia Mangoni, Meletios Meletiou, Diego Miguel Mirabella, Jacopo Rinaldi, Agnese Spolverini, The Cool Couple, Elo Vega, Alessandro Vizzini, Benyamin Zolfaghari.

Following the itinerary, the second section, called Printed matter, focuses on the applications of printing in the artistic field and on the artist’s book practice, including rare publications and unique editorial objects, always according to an approach aimed at emphasizing a certain plurality. Artworks by Alessia Armeni, Georges De Canino, Quentin Lefranc, Lucia Marcucci, Lamberto Pignotti and Sergio Sarra (in collaboration with Emilio Prini) builld up this segment of the exhibition. Furthermore, this station is completed by a focus on pieces coming from the archives of real landmarks of Roman publishing culture and graphics such as the Litografia Bulla, the Giuseppe Garrera Collection and the Marini Bibliographic study.

In the third and last section the intervention by the collective Gli impresari (Edoardo Aruta, Marco Di Giuseppe, Rosario Sorbello) takes place, achieved with the contributions of forty artists. In this circumstance, the exhibition room hosts a single installation consisting of magic lanterns and different kinds of image-projection machines, referred to different chronologies. Outlined in this way, the operation well reproduces the plural articulation with which the exhibition was conjugated, succeeding in the attempt to deepen addresses of actual relevance and collateral to artistic practice, such as media corruption, the circulation of images, the relationship between images and public.

The exhibition, opened to visitors until Saturday December 18^th, is completed by a publication, edited by DITO Publishing, which, with the curator’s text and images, crosses and argues the complexity of the project.

Info:

Porta Portese
27/11/2021 – 18/12/2021
SPAZIOMENSA
Via Salaria 971, Roma