Michele Dantini: Untitled

Opening. March 12th at 6pm

Untitled is an exhibition about forms of exhibiting. About how, and whether or not, to give narrative shape to a collection of works with no apparent “theme”, “title” or statement? For many years the artist has had an interest in models of discourse, interwoven with a reflection upon the relationships between images and words. Untitled includes photographic images, texts, lacquered objects and drawings on paper and vintage images from a 1970s conceptual archive (focusing on the relationship between art, collectorship and nature; on the Western “construction” of the mirage of nature as “uncontaminated” and “wild”; on the themes of “closeness” and “distance”). These items are distributed around the gallery: they are like elements of a constellation or an archipelago; like clues, the sensitive margins of an “immaterial” argument of which they define the potential traces, pulsations or routes of meaning, by converging elusively.

The works in this exhibition include a series of large format photographs which investigates the social and political customs of nature, the recreation of patches of a lost verdant splendour in the very heart of the city, the locations of social, cultural, demographic change: in the headquarters of corporations and large professional firms; in streets or square; within institutional contexts. Carried out over the course of long periods of research and residencies, these images make up a sort of selective, fragmented investigation into the human mind; an investigation carried out by looking carefully at the fictions of distance, movement, splendour; at the devices, the signs, the lines that fortify or fracture the illusion, and the artifices that have supported and generated that illusion. The images are a reference to the complex relationships between museum and myth, between modernist architecture and travel accounts; encounter and discovery. They move backwards along the narrow genealogical trail that leads from the building to the mirage; from the rhetoric of exhibition design and displays to the mental process stirred by it.

One-man shows and videoscreenings (selection): 2009 Cythére, Villa Bardini, Florence, curators A. Salvadori and L. Fassi; 2007 A Green Nothing, Fondazione Merz, Turin; Baedeker, Tusciaelecta, curator Arabella Natalini; 2006 Are you sensitive?, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, curator D. Filardo; 2005 Shifts, Spazio Raum, Bologna, curators Andrea Lissoni and Daniele Gasparinetti; 2004 Incantations (with A. Lonquich), Feldkirch (A), curator T. Hengelbrock.

Group exhibitions (selection): 2008 Vent’anni prima, vent’anni dopo, Centro Pecci, Prato, curator M. Bazzini; Per adesso siamo qua, Villa Romana, Florence, curator L. Bruni; The Last Book, National Library of Argentina, Buenos Aires, curator L. Camnitzer; 2007 I-City, Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, curators E. Mazzini and V. Ciuffi; 2005 The Gesture, A Visual Library in Progress, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, curators M. Fokidis and D. Vitali (G); 2004 Schreibstation, Stiftung Galerie fur Zeitenossische Kunst, Leipzig (D), curator J. Schafer; 2003 Weeds/Neighbours, X Biennale Internazionale di Fotografia, Turin, curator A. Detheridge.

Future projects: April 2009 Green Platform, Strozzina Centre for Contemporary Culture at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, curators V. Gensini and L. Giusti; MM Yearly, bilingual magazine on political and cultural ecology; giugno 2009 Bezalel Academy of Art and Design of Jerusalem, curator Niccolò Asher Salah; December 2009 MaXXi, Roma, curators E. Cohen and G. Guercio, publication|conference|workshop on Contemporary Italian Art (Electa). He is currently working on behalf of the Osservatorio per le arti contemporanee, Florence, on putting together a panel of artists, curators and cultural theorists on the themes of art and sustainability.

Michele Dantini
Untitled