For a Forthcoming Reality. A new commission by Antonio Della Guardia
Curated by Vasco Forconi
For a Forthcoming Reality by Antonio Della Guardia is the third appointment of Shoegaze, a series of new commissions realized with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. Through this project, curated by Vasco Forconi, the Institute intends to promote contemporary art by inviting a series of artists residing in Sweden and Italy to engage with the legacy of the building designed by Gio Ponti in the late 1950s. Following the exhibitions of Lisa Grip and Danae Valenza in the spring of 2019 and Stefano Serretta in the summer of the same year, Antonio Della Guardia produces a series of seven videos that will broadcast from December 16 to 24, 2020, on the Institute’s digital platforms (Facebook and Instagram).
For a Forthcoming Reality originates from the artist’s encounter with the writings of William Horatio Bates (1860-1931), an American physician known for developing a method of re-education of the sight without the use of eyeglasses – becoming both an object of popular cult and fierce criticism by the scientific community. Starting from Bates’ studies – almost a debris of the 20th century’s scientific culture – Della Guardia designs a series of exercises, which he defines evasion techniques, conceived to poetically resist the consequences of a prolonged and forced exposure of the gaze to sources of digital light. Each of the seven videos, accompanied by the artist’s detailed instructions, constitutes the score to perform a specific exercise of the gaze, inviting the audience to its daily and diffused execution. The exercises, freed from their original therapeutic function, thus reveal their meditative and full of imagery charge, becoming tools to discuss about vision, imagination, and flight from work.
Calendar
December 17: Wide oscillations
December 18: Peripheral vision exploration
December 19: Palming
December 20: Shifting
December 21: Blinking
December 22: Sunning
December 23: Looking far
The research of Antonio Della Guardia (Salerno 1990) develops through different expressive languages, focusing on the power mechanisms inherent in the work and social dynamics and in the hierarchies that influence the personal conditions of life of the human being.
Selected personal exhibitions: La luce dell’inchiostro ottenebra, Tiziana Di Caro Gallery, Napoli 2018; Index, Studioconcreto, Lecce, 2018.
Selected group exhibitions: La metafora dell’arciere, Tiziana Di Caro Gallery, Napoli, 2020; Kizart, video art festival curated by Nomas Foundation, Videogallery MAXXI, Roma, 2019; The Corrosion of Character, l’uomo flessibile, Q-International, curated by Alessandra Troncone and Kateryna Filyuk, Izolyatsia Foundation, Kiev, 2019; Mind the gap, curated by Emanuele Riccomi, Barriera Association, Torino, 2018; Samoupravna interesna zajednica u galeriji waldinger, curated by Nemanja Cvijanovic, Wladinger Gallery, Osijek, 2018; Disio, nostalgia del futuro, curated by Antonello Tolve, La Caja, Caracas, 2017; Sensibile comune, le opere vive, curated by Ilaria Bussoni, Nicolas Martino and Cesare Pietroiusti, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma, 2017. In 2016 he was in residence at the Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como.
mediapartner: Untitled Association