CURA.

30/03/2023

Tita Cicognani
Text by Cecily Chen

In Cicognani’s video, desire is precarious—deleterious, even. At the same time that it promises us love, it puts us at risk of injury, disappointment, and heartbreak. To that end, to paraphrase Lauren Berlant, desire can also be cruel—it strings us along even when it is “an obstacle to [our] flourishing,” even when what we want the most (a rose, a kiss) is nowhere in sight.1 But pain is not the only corollary to this cruelty. Between the tears and wounds, the avatar also dances by the beach, laughing and twirling, elated at the possibility of romance. If the question is “do you think you’re better off alone,” the avatar’s scraped knees tell us emphatically: yes, but we don’t want to be alone.
💭❤️
⛓️ in bio

10/03/2023

Sara Sadik ❄️💨💛
Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga

📅 February 22 — April 28, 2023
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Basement Roma is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Italy of the French artist Sara Sadik, Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga.
Born by a wide collaboration between public and private institutions, Sara Sadik’s exhibition will then move to the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, with a three-day performance (April 2023) before moving—with a second chapter of the show—to the Kunsthalle Lissabon at the end of June 2023.

📸 Online
📍 Basement Roma. Viale Mazzini 128, Rome
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Sara Sadik, Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga, 2023
Installation view Basement Roma, 2023
Courtesy: the artist and Crèvevoeur Paris
Commissioned by Basement Roma
Photo: Roberto Apa

24/02/2023

Since Max Hooper Schneider defines his work as a set of “vibratory exchanges” with his ecosystem, it seems to me to be logical to begin by drawing up his ID card as a living organism, for all artists are bodies through which matter is filtered, distributed and reorganized. How have their intellectual training, culture and the environment in which they grew up created their predispositions, or their specific way of feeling and thinking?
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Max Hooper Schneider
The Molecular Accelerator
Text by Nicolas Bourriaud
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CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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LINK IN BIO
🐬

17/02/2023

Sara Sadik
Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga
February 22 — April 21, 2023
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Basement Roma
📍 Viale Mazzini 128
Rome
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Basement Roma, the project led by CURA. since 2012, is thrilled to announce the opening on February 22, of its new exhibition space, with the first solo exhibition in Italy by French artist Sara Sadik, Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga, a multi-media installation shaping a futuristic ho**ah lounge.
Through a wide collaboration among private and public institutions, Sara Sadik’s exhibition will then move to Villa Medici / Académie de France with a three days performance (April 26–28, 2023) before moving—with a second chapter of the show—to the Kunsthalle Lissabon, at the end of June 2023. A talk between the artist and French curator Martha Kirszenbaum will be held at Soho House Roma, on February 21, in the frame of The Art Room program.
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.affoua.kouassi .giorgetta

03/02/2023

OUT NOW! 📖 💥
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Jonas Mekas
Images Are Real
Edited by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
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Mattatoio, Roma
in collaboration with the Lithuanian Culture Institute
the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Romemekas.expanded

02/02/2023

DIS
Everything But The World
Schinkel Pavillon
3. Feb. 2023 – 26. Feb. 2023
/ at
Curated by Klara Hülskamp & Lina Louisa Krämer ()

31/01/2023

Basement Roma, the project led by CURA. since 2012, is thrilled to announce the opening on February 22, of its new exhibition space, with the first solo exhibition in Italy by French artist Sara Sadik
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Basement Roma
New Exhibition Space
Viale Mazzini 128, Rome
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SAVE THE DATE!
February 22, 2023
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Basement Roma’s new graphic identity and website are designed by Dan Solbach (with Emma Kouassi).
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.affoua.kouassi .giorgetta

27/01/2023

Mimosa Echard
Intimate Perceptions of the Living World
Text by Flora Katz
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Special Project for CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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Credits:
Mimosa Echard, Escape more, 2022
Color photocopies
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
.katz

20/01/2023

On a muggy summer evening, I sat down with artist Elaine Cameron-Weir at her studio in New York City to discuss her multifaceted practice. I first saw Cameron-Weir’s work at Ramiken Crucible in 2014: giant, gaping, elegant clamshells that doubled as incense burners. Her approach has continued to intrigue, mining strange seams of material possibility. Over wine, we touched on a range of topics: mythology, preppers, techno-optimism, and the origins of the word “hypocrisy,” to name a few.
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Elaine Cameron-Weir
in conversation with Jody Graf
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CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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LINK IN BIO 💎

13/01/2023

There is not only a heat wave at the moment but also a drought in Europe. Every few weeks there is a new virus or ecological disaster, and it is becoming just a normal situation.

Katja Novitskova
In conversation with Joanna Zylinska .zylinska
Special Project for CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?

🦠💥❤️
Link in bio > …

09/01/2023

Korakrit Arunanondchai
Text by X Zhu-Nowell
Portrait by Harit Srikhao

Some stories start at the end. If an ending loops, the story could be a song. Songs for living and Songs for dying tell a story about the same immortal protagonist, a living being who manages a highly sensitive feedback loop. Let’s call them THE SOUL.
This essay is not about THE SOUL. It begins and ends with a painter. He paints not with brushes but symbols, meter, and light, so the objects he makes are typically paintings-still-in-progress. It’s not easy to hang The Painter’s work on a wall, but this style of painting has its advantages. One merit is analogical; paintings-still-in-progress are good for indirectly illustrating the narratives of complex characters, such as THE SOUL.

Some stories start at the end. If an ending loops, the story could be a song. Songs for living and Songs for dying tell a story about the same immortal protagonist, a living being who manages a highly sensitive feedback loop. Let’s call them THE SOUL. Text by X Zhu-Nowell

05/01/2023

Ariana Papademetropoulos
Baby Alone in Babylone
Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York
Nov 11, 2022 – Jan 7, 2023
Review by Sofia Gallarate

Ariana and I met a few months ago, when I went to visit her temporary Roman studio located in a narrow street in Trastevere. The studio faced the walls of the city’s prison Regina Coeli, and the entrance is only two doors away from the Istituto Sacri Cuori for missionary nuns in Trastevere. We spent some time talking about seclusion (the prefix se-, which means “apart”, implies a place or a condition that’s “closed away”), and what means artistically, and personally to her. I knew some of the new paintings she made while in Rome had to do with this feeling, but it wasn’t until I visited her studio, being in the immediate vicinity of these two architectures with such charged isolating connotations, that I realised the extent to which Ariana’s Roman location had to do with the poetics of her new exhibition Baby Alone in Babylone.

Ariana and I met a few months ago, when I went to visit her temporary Roman studio located in a narrow street in Trastevere. The studio faced the walls of the city’s prison Regina Coeli, and the entrance is only two doors away from the Istituto Sacri Cuori for missionary nuns in Trastevere. We spe...

05/01/2023

Nico Vascellari
Tre, Quattro Galline
XXIV EDITION OF PREMIO PINO PASCALI 2022
Fondazione Pino Pascali - Museo di Arte Contemporanea
Until 9 April 2023

The XXIV Premio Pino Pascali 2022 has been awarded to Nico Vascellari. Until 9 April 2023, the Pino Pascali Foundation will be hosting the solo exhibition Tre, Quattro Galline, curated by the Commission of the Prize chaired by Rosalba Branà and the curators Roberto Lacarbonara and Pier Paolo Pancotto.
The exhibition features original sculptures and collages. The Work Out Of Step (2022), placed on the front wall at the entrance of the main room, consists of three sheep-shaped elements: a reference to the homonymous album by the American hardcore punk band Minor Threat. The artist employs an anarchist metaphor of being “out of the pack” while also recovering his secret tattoo of this iconic element.
The relationship with the animal world, the central theme of the exhibition, also returns in the main installation Tre, Quattro Galline (2022), placed in the centre of the main room. A mysterious sculptural presence that, destined to reveal itself only when accessing the hall, involves and rejects the audience by surprising them visually and emotionally.

The relationship with the animal world, the central theme of the exhibition, also returns in the main installation Tre, Quattro Galline...

16/12/2022

Arthur Jafa. RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON
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OGR, Turin
04.11.22 — 12.02.23
💎

12/12/2022

WangShui
Text by Margot Norton
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CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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WangShui’s video, From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances (2018), opens with a drone shot of a gaping hole inside a sky-high luxury residential complex facing the south China sea. This hole is one of many perforating the Hong Kong skyline, designed as ‘dragon gates,’ which according to the ancient practice of feng shui allows dragons to fly from the mountains to the ocean, and positive energy to flow through as a result. As the artist explains in the video’s narration, feng shui was banned in 1949 after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s its practitioners were violently persecuted and fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan where their work flourished.

WangShui’s video, From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances (2018), opens with a drone shot of a gaping hole inside a sky-high luxury residential complex facing the south China sea. This hole is one of many perforating the Hong Kong skyline, designed as ‘dragon gates,’ whi...

06/12/2022

Jakob Kudsk Steensen
in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23

"I investigate how video games enable us to develop a sensibility of the environment. Natural spaces influence us in a deep psychological way. How, then, to expand our perceptions through technology? By way of an example, researchers have noticed sperm-whales are not only able to use echolocation to memorize entire regions but also to communicate through space. As humans, we might actually do it with video games, whose potentials are largely underrated."

Coming from digital art, I would suggest to never expect a given system to be fixed in time. If you are working with a peripheral or unaccepted format, look at it from a unique perspective. Embrace it and build upon it rather than try to adapt it to an existing format.

02/12/2022

✨
Meriem Bennani
Cursed Objects
C L E A R I N G �, Brussels
November 9 – December 23, 2022

Hello, welcome, Make yourself comfortable, The camera is on the table, (Is that true, at your crotch level ? I’m an amateur, not the devil)

28/11/2022

LuYang
Text by Nora Gantert
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CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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“I am the person in my dream, and I am also the dreamer.”[1]
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24/11/2022

Analisa Teachworth
Text by Maurin Dietrich
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CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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Analisa Teachworth developed an artistic practice that ties personal experience and history into a visual language over the past ten years. Her methods, which address the materiality and mythology of world-building and self-defining, are as unique and ambitious as her being.
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READ MORE >>>

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maurindietrich

24/11/2022

Will Benedict
Dialogue of the Dogs
Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva
October 15 – December 18, 2022

Will Benedict’s chimeric imagery draws as much from the history of art and literature as from advertising and pop culture

17/11/2022

Next week in Milano
Join us at
CURA. 39 Launch and Display by BB




.39 .

09/11/2022

Cyprien Gaillard
Text by Niels Olsen and Fredi Fischli
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CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23
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"... Starting from the subject of preservation, Cyprien Gaillard produces his large-scale exhibition, entitled Humpty Dumpty, in numerous unfolding chapters of an urban investigation into museology. As the title hints, it follows a fable of restoration, drawing on the premise that architectural face-lifting can never be understood from a neutral perspective.
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🔓 💥⚡️

31/10/2022

Rodrigo Hernández
Anche di notte
Review by João Mourão and Luís Silva
P420, Bologna, Italy
23 September–12 November 2022

The practice of Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, 1983) has been driven, since its inception, by an ongoing and sometimes overwhelming impulse to escape, from a physical point of view, the constraints of language. There is a sense of both freedom and complexity in giving substance to an idea, a concept or an emotion through a gesture or a drawing rather than through words, whether they are written or spoken ones. The result of this apparent difficulty in verbal expression is thus materialized, within Hernánez’s work, through the creation of silent images full of paradoxes that summon lasting moments of doubt and uncertainty.

The practice of Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, 1983) has been driven, since its inception, by an ongoing and sometimes overwhelming impulse to escape, from a physical point of view, the constraints of language. There is a sense of both freedom and complexity in giving substance to an idea, a conce...

27/10/2022

Pierre Huyghe: Variants
Text by Amelia Barikin

CURA. 39
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall Winter 22-23

“I was looking for an entity, constituted of different milieux, that could react, generate, and I was looking for different intelligences at play,” he explains. “One milieu was given: the natural. I wanted the actual to host a possibility of itself.”

There are time ripples on this island. Monstrous mutations spawned by the patterns of algorithmic codes. A simulation of a milieu, replicated from a copy and set to grow, begins to create its own anomalies. Exiting the simulation, they appear in three dimensions, in materials of wood, wax, silicone,...

10/10/2022

CURA. 39 ♾ ☄
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall–Winter 22-23

COVER 4/4
PIERRE HUYGHE
Text by Amelia Barikin ì
A Conversation with Vincent Honoré

Pre-order now via link in bio.

CURA. 39 feature





.zylinska
.katz
-Weir





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10/10/2022

CURA. 39 ♾
Are We Eternal Beings?
Fall–Winter 22-23

COVER 3/4
KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI
Text by X Zhu-Nowell

Pre-order now via link in bio.

CURA. 39 feature





.zylinska
.katz
-Weir





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