AlbumArte | VideoArtForum
presents
Chasing Boundaries Belfast (video, 32’, 2017)
By Zaelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano
Italian Premiere
Following: the artists in conversation with Manuela Pacella and Paola Ugolini
Tuesday, November 14 2017 at 7:00 PM
AlbumArte – Via Flaminia 122, Roma | Free entrance
Video curated by Manuela Pacella
Under the coordination of Micol Di Veroli | Produced by AlbumArte and Bangalore Video
After the preview at ArtVerona 2017 and after the premiere at Galerie Délire en Formation in Paris – during the FIAC 2017 Arte Week, AlbumArte is proud to presents the Italian preview screening of Chasing Boundaries Belfast by artists Zaelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano, as part of its ongoing programme AlbumArte | VideoArtForum. Following the screening of the video, the artists will be in conversation with art critics Manuela Pacella – who curated the video, and Paola Ugolini, who has followed the project since the first chapter.
Belfast is a magical city that can only reveal its secrets to those who come close to it with silent curiosity, without too many preconceptions about its tearing past related to the Troubles, mostly known through the mass media.
With great surprise, it’s about to discover a very fervent artistic scene where artists and different exhibition spaces support each other, creating a highly collaborative cultural atmosphere.
The artists selected for the third chapter of Chasing Boundaries are of different caliber and belong to different generation. With the only exception of one artist from Northern Ireland, they come from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, demonstrating how Belfast is an incredible catalyst thanks to the presence of the Ulster University, and thanks to art places such as Flax Art Studios or Platform Arts, which give the opportunity to get an artist studio easily. Furthermore, artists can show their works inside very dynamic exhibition spaces, many of which are non-profit spaces, co-directed by groups of artists.
Chasing Boundaries is a series of documentary films created by Zaelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano, coordinated by Micol Di Veroli, produced by AlbumArte and Bangalore Video. It focused on contemporary art. It’s another documentary form that defies the plot and the easily digested information and opens sensory receptors to new modes of perception. The series was developed by Zelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano to describe the art practice with a video art approach. The aim is to gather different voices from distant lands, statements of people that dealt with the difficult and impossible and learned to transform those experiences into art. The interviews pull the viewer into the position of the subject and examines how artists work with images of the everyday and give them a different meaning.
Artists interviewd: Alastair MacLennan, Peter Richards, Justine McDonnell, Liam Crichton, Martin Boyle, Anne Marie Taggart.
Zaelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano’s practice is based on observations of encounter, interaction and fusion between image and vision. Their projects examine in particular the relationship with everyday society, identities and connections between images and social behavior. Documentation, collection, the exploration of the art factual dimension, re-representations of images and spaces with various media, or creating a new presence for them, form Their practice. Zaelia Bishop and Emanuele Napolitano are interested in considerations of the possibility and impossibility of vision, or how images and visions in general can be practiced any more today and exploring the life-span and cycles of an image and its topic. In 2015 the work They Left Us has been selected in the in Shorts films Corner of Festival de Cannes 2015. In 2016 they started Chasing Boundaries, a project of video-documentary to describe the art practice with a video art approach, and it’s another documentary form that defies the plot and the easily digested information and opens sensory receptors to new modes of perception. The first chapter (Official Selection of Shorts films Corner – Festival de Cannes 2016) was shot in Israel and it was presented at AlbumArte in April, 2016. The second one, shot in Vilnius, was presented as a premiere screening at AlbumArte on January, 2017. The third chapter, shot in Belfast, was presented as a premiere in Paris, and then in Rome. All the chapters have been presented at ArtVerona 2017 – i8 independent spaces Section.
Manuela Pacella was born in Rome in 1977. She completed her primary degree with a monographic dissertation on David Tremlett and continued her studies in Contemporary Art History at the University of Siena. She has worked both at public institutions such as the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, and at private galleries. Since 2007 she has been working as an independent curator in private and public spaces and writing as an art critic for exhibition’s catalogues and for art magazines. At the same time she carried on her fascination with the history of photography at its beginnings and she specialized in subjects like the relationship between art and photography and family photography. Following the exhibition curated in Belfast in 2012, Patria Interiore, she started to develop her interest in Northern Irish History and Art thanks to being selected in 2013 to the ICI’s Curatorial Intensive at the CCA in Derry and to the International Residency at Flax Art studios in Belfast. As a guest curator she realized the exhibition Lost in Narration. Riccardo Giacconi, Invernomuto e Luca Trevisani at the MAC in Belfast and led the second Curatorial Directions focused on the importance of text, narration, and story-telling in relation to exhibition making with workshops and talks in Belfast and Milan. In 2015 and 2016 was Editorial Researcher and Coordinator at NERO (Rome) and actually works between Italy, Austria and Northern Ireland.
Paola Ugolini lives and works in Rome. She is an independent curator and art critic. She regularly writes for Exibart and Il Giornale dell’Arte. In 1993, with Laura Cherubini she was the curator of the collective exhibition Macchine per la Pace held in the former Yugoslav Pavilion for the XLV Venice Biennale. In 2006, she was co-curator, with Laura Cherubini and Andrea Bellini, of Gino de Dominicis’ solo exhibition at PS1 and MoMA, New York. Since 2007 she has been the curator of CortoArteCircuito’s artistic projects, a cultural association producing short movies about contemporary art; since 2010, together with CortoArteCircuito, she is the curator of the project Crossing Cultures in cooperation with Asiatica Film Mediale of Rome, a group of Asian directors making short movies on Italian artists (four short movies have been produced in 2010, filming artists such as Maurizio Mochetti, Luigi Ontani, Sandro Chia and Giuseppe Gallo, in 2011 goldiechiari, Pietro Ruffo, Alfredo Pirri, Nunzio, whereas Alessandro Piangiamore, Alessandro Sarra, Alberto di Fabio and Marco Tirelli in 2012). From 2011 Paola Ugolini is the curator of the project filming the “making of” of exhibitions held at MAXXI Museum in Rome (Michelangelo Pistoletto, Indian Highway, Fratelli Campana and Masbedo). Among the most recent exhibition projects that she has curated: Corpo a corpo | Body to Body, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2017; THE BODY AS LANGUAGE. BODY ART AND PERFORMANCE. WHAT IS LEFT, Richard Saltoun Gallery London, 2015; Alice Schivardi, Fondazione Pescheria, Pesaro, 2015; Fair Play. Arte, video e sport oltre i limiti e i confini, MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2014; In queste stanze… Malandrino, Gianni Politi, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2014; And What is left unsaid… Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Macro Museum, Rome, 2014. Since 2015 she is part of the Scientific Commitee of AlbumArte.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND PRESS CONTACT
AlbumArte Via Flaminia, 122 Roma – Free entrance
T +39 063243882 E info@albumarte.org W www.albumarte.org
________________________________________________
