Adunanza is the first Adelita Husni-Bey’s personal exhibition in an Italian institute. Ten years of works, concerning the principal themes of radical pedagogy and the modality of development of common mindset, gathered together in Modena’s Palazzina dei Giardini.

Displaying about fifty works, the curators Diana Baldon and Serena Goldoni explain furthermore the artist’s diversity of approach with the help of placements, paintings, videos, photographic series, papers. Placed in the middle of the entrance hall there’s the video Postcard from the Desert Island (2011), which inspires first an ideological draft spreading across the building, congregating the audience to watch the birth of social hierarchies between children playing castaways on a desert island.

The itineraries of the exhibition radiate in six rooms collocated on a double level of views: on the one hand there’s the summary of Husni-Bey’s young career, on the other there are methodologies for the interpretation of current social lines, suggesting expertly how imposed education systems’ blows challenge over and over again man to put himself out ther in order to achieve this or that title.

Glass Dome and Public Garden are photographic extracts of a pedagogical laboratory, commissioned by the MoMa, which take place within the series The Council, where some adolescents were asked by the artist to revolutionize the areas of the museum. And if After the finish line focuses on the origin of the desire of success in relation to the experience of injury lived as a failure, in the subsequent room the series in process Encounters on pain collects the “radiographies” of those who submitted to the individual performance made up by interviews with the artist. The performance, reintroduced during the exhibition, got rich thanks to other surveys, if we can name them like this, about the relationship between the individual and pain. Bulletin boards with paintings and drawings, kept in the perimeter sides of the Palazzina dei Giardini, are not minor detectors of the deep connection between the artist and those expressive means. Some of them are preparatory sketches, inquiries of subjects who highlight natural predisposition to this artistic practice.

Adelita Husni-Bey’s sociological studies flow into interest for educational anarcho-collectivism theories and for experimental practices of teaching; in this way the artist gains composite devices, essential to deal with the personal attitude to proceed directly towards the heart of the ongoing issues. Therefore we can see how variety of expression, together with thematic stubbornness, is outlined in a precise recon of her career, but also (and maybe that’s the most interesting element in the exhibition) in possible further development.

Domenico Russo  

Info:

Adelita Husni-Bey. Adunanza
curated by Diana Baldon e Serena Goldoni
June 9  – August 26 2018
Palazzina dei Giardini
Corso Camillo Benso Conte di Cavour, 2 Modena