POZI: places and landscapes of tomorrow. Curated by Giggs Kgole, with a text by Buhle Mathole. From 2 to 6 July 2024.

The Call for the 10th Edition of the ARP-Art Residency Project is now open. Artists and curators under 30 can apply and win the training residency created with the contribution of the Italian MAECI.

Corpus. The photographic research of Samantha Marenzi. Curated by Simone Azzoni and Marco Rapaccini. 11 March – 1 April 2023

Vernissage 11 Marzo 2023 ore 18,00. La mostra è organizzata dal Centro Di Sarro con Grenze Arsenali Fotografici (Verona) e Officine Fotografiche (Roma).

Samantha Marenzi, professor at the DAMS of the Roma 3 University, specializes in analogue photography and manual printing techniques. Corpus is a project in three stages of transition, three alchemical stages, three linguistic and material nuclei that tell the relationship between image and Butō, photography and dance, visual arts and performing arts. “I have always used only analogue photography, and with projects linked to presence and corporeity I began my experimentation with ancient printing techniques. A slow and long process of image creation, organic to the times and silences of the work on the body, a corpus”. In a never documentary relationship between scene and photography, the image is part of the creative process as a diagnosis and scan of movement, as a linguistic translation, as a rhythmic score “in” and “on” the black. The images develop the Butō of the Lios group, of La Maison du Butoh Blanc, but also what Marenzi experienced in Japan following Akira Kasai, a dancer who participated in the foundation of Butō and who then crossed the cultures and practices of ‘East and West. Fragments of projects exhibited in numerous Italian events and foyers find themselves in dialogue at the Centro Luigi Di Sarro together with unpublished works specially printed for Corpus. Also on display is the artist’s latest work with the performer Alessandra Cristiani, a trilogy of three projects for as many shows and exhibitions: one dedicated to Schiele and made in cyanotype, one to Bacon and made in Polaroid, the last to Rodin in silver salt emulsion on paper and stone. “The images constitute both the sources and the destinations of the three performances. Each solo is linked to a photographic project which investigates the variations of its corporeity stimulated by the work of the three chosen artists and experiments with the contaminations between different techniques. In all three stages we worked in collaboration with Alberto Canu, who uses digital and usually shoots the shows, in rehearsal or live”.

VAA 3rd Edition. The 10 finalists screened at the UJ Arts Centre. Journey to discover the Johannesburg art scene for the Italian winner Giulia Savorani who presented her work together with Liza Grobler who won the selection for South Africa.

The second event to promote the works selected for the third edition of the VIDEO ART AWARDS took place on 9 December 2022. Second opportunity for the two winners Liza Grobler and Giulia Savorani to meet and promote the other 8 finalists of the award dedicated to video art created by the Di Sarro Center with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute of Pretoria and the Consulate General of Italy in Johannesburg, South Africa and the Grenze Festival in Verona, Italy.

For Giulia Savorani it was an opportunity to discover Johannesburg’s lively art scene, for a week after the screening event she was in fact, thanks to the award, able to visit museums, research centres, artists’ studios and galleries as well as historical and traditions of the country of Nelson Mandela thus discovering its history and current events.

The folds of the void, is the exhibition that concludes the CL/PA – the travel project created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (X Edition 2021). Giulia Fumagalli + Aran Ndimurwanko. Opening 19 November 2022 h.17-20.

How to tell two distant places after having had an intense experience of them?
What shapes can they take? What in them can be considered full?
What, instead, empty? And how these entities so different can dialogue?

These are some of the questions that revolve around The folds of the void, the exhibition by Giulia Fumagalli (Carate Brianza – MI, 1990) with Aran Ndimurwanko (Trento, 1991) which take place at the Centro Luigi Di Sarro in Rome, from 19 November to 23 December 2022. Critical text by Alice Evangelisti.

It is a heterogeneous selection of works resulting from the double residency that the two artists experienced during the spring 2022, first in Chile and then in Panama.
The result is thus their personal and artistic vision of these two places, geographically close, but completely at the antipodes. On the one hand, the Chilean landscape, visually open due to the immense desert expanse, which, although empty, is capable of triggering continuous connections. On the other hand, the Panamanian one, visually closed due to the presence of the impenetrable jungle, which fills the eyes and the mind, overpopulating them with images.

Two completely opposite experiences, which mutually activate sensations of fullness and
of emptiness, opposing them but at the same time making them also become the consequence of the other. Thus, focusing on the extrinsic and intrinsic characteristics of these two places, Fumagalli and Ndimurwanko give their interpretation. If Fumagalli investigates two natural elements water and air – which materialize in light and poetic installations able to evoke their presence, Ndimurwanko shapes the earth, giving life to works full of daily rituals.

The exhibition is part of the project CL/PA – the travel by Giulia Fumagalli, created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (X edition, 2021), a program for the international promotion of Italian art of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Francesca Floris – The World of Las – curated by Flavio De Bernardinis – 2019 May 11th / June 8th – Opening May 11th from 6:00 pm to 20:30 pm

Is the lens of the camera a window, or a mirror? And the mirror, in any case, can it also be a camera? And finally, what is seen, in both cases, is shown, or reflected? The photographic installations of Francesca Floris are inscribed within this conceptual field, which, in the electronic age, or rather the season of indistinct multiplication of images without support, constitutes the heart of the contemporary social and anthropological scene.

Combined with the reflection motif, the theme of the body. Perceivable as an eternally delayed presence in the game of refractions, the body is confirmed as a strong and inescapable presence.

The art of Francesca Floris thus poses the cardinal problem: in the labyrinth of reflections, is the image a support of the body, or does the body, with its tender and merciless availability, constitute, here and now, the support of the image?

It is up to the viewer to formulate a hypothesis, if not decisive, at least participatory, of a figurative and sensorial project, which touches, in depth and on the surface, the key theme of contemporary culture, a social and also a political theme, that is the fragile question, full-bodied and reflected, though still unresolved, of identity. (Flavio De Bernardinis)

The World of Las was born from the desire to describe a platonic love. The story is about a woman who is projected into the fantasies of the person who loves her. These imaginary places are the only place where she enjoys the love of which she is the object. To represent this situation, I chose to really project the protagonist of this project into the scenarios that represent the imagination of the narrator. The idea was, from the beginning, to “host” the woman in these fantasies, which in the photographs appear as concrete and tangible places, while she appears as a projection, an apparition, something distant and ghostly. The viewer then moves into the mind of the person who loves. (Francesca Floris)

The exhibition is structured in four parts. The first stage of the exhibition is composed of 10 illustrations (one for each chapter of the story), in 40 x 60 cm format, accompanied by a brief quote from the chapter of the story that each represents.

The illustrations are followed by an exhibition of 10 photographs, in 60 x 90 cm format.

The third stage of the journey consists of a limited space, where a backstage video is shown that shows the functioning of the mechanism and the process of making the photographs.

Finally, visitors access a specially lit space, inside which the mechanism with which the photographs were taken is exposed and where they, after learning how it works, can look at each other and photograph themselves inside an interactive environment recreated to show its function and to allow guests to immerse themselves, some in the eyes of the narrator, some in the shoes of the photographed woman.

Francesca Floris was born in Oristano on April 6th 1992. She received her classical high school diploma in 2011, in Sassari. She graduated from Brunel University in London in 2014. In England she joined the art collective Ad Libitum Films, with which she made numerous short films, a web series and her first feature film, the documentary Isole. She moved to the United States in 2014 to pursue a master’s degree. She started working as a photographer at the end of 2015. Since then she has presented two personal exhibitions (Olympus 50 and Il palco bianco) and taken part in two group exhibitions. She attended the Producing course at the “Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia” in Rome in the 2016-2018 three-year period. At the moment she is graduating in Anthropology at the University of Siena.

The World of Las is her second project of staged photography. The first one was Il palco bianco (2017).

RETURN Berlin/Rome 2019 April 4th – May 4th. Exchange project with VEREIN BERLINER KÜNSTLER under patronage of Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Berlin. Opening 4.4.2019, 6-8pm

The project RETURN Berlin-Rome | Rome-Berlin, born from an idea by Susanne Kessler, is curated by the Centro Di Sarro in collaboration with the Verein Berliner Künstler, and under the patronage of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Berlin, with the intention of starting an exchange between the artistic realities of Italy and Germany through the dialogue between the two cities where the proposing associations are based. The project involves two parts: RETURN Berlin-Rome will exhibit the works of 5 German artists (Birgit Borggrebe, Jürgen Kellig, Susanne Kessler, Nele Probst, Marianne Stoll) and the works at the Centro Di Sarro, from 4 April to 4 May 2019 subsequently RETURN Rome-Berlin will see the exhibition of the works of 5 Italian artists (Andrea Aquilanti, Angelo Casciello, Veronica Montanino, Pamela Pintus, Sara Spizzichino) at the Galerie VBK-Verein Berliner Künstler, from 13 September to 6 October 2019.

Birgit Borggrebe.Born in Arnsberg, lives and works in Berlin.
“The harsh and abstract character of our cities, the globalization of the modern world, are in contrast with what remains of Nature: here a tree, a herd of goats there, yet even the clouds themselves shine with suspicious colors. Borggrebe’s images are kaleidoscopes, poetic encounters with a nightmarish reality that could soon cover a large part of our planet. An aesthetic protest spreads from the paintings: that our world is not as it should be. Although it seems strange, the futuristic and apocalyptic landscapes depicted in his paintings are permeated by something that could be described as a “nostalgia for Paradise”. (Kai Michel, Zurich)

Jürgen Kellig. Born in Berlin where he lives and works.
My drawings deal with rhythm and structure, in particular with the interaction between chaos and order, with the similarities between micro and macrocosm. Although reworked in a concrete way, these works can recall organic networks, as well as technological networks. (Jürgen Kellig)
Jürgen Kellig draws freehand. The accuracy of its graphic elements does not follow a program, a pre-established scheme. It simulates the certainty of geometric laws, as in a free zone between micrological proximity and macrological distance: a subject already addressed by the author in previous works. Consequently, the titles of his drawings suggest conceptual clarity: “notation”, “score”, “interconnection”, “civilization”. They transform images into conceptual associations. Images that are the result of associative processes related to a graphic self-referentiality, fixing point as point, line as line and plan as plan or their arbitrary succession. (Wolfgang Siano, from the text in the catalog “Implacable, between line and line and beyond”)

Susanne Kessler. Born in Wuppertal in 1955, she lives and works in Berlin and Rome.
She studied painting and graphics in Berlin at the Hochschule der Künste (UDK) and in London at the Royal College of Art (RCA). She prefers large installations, both indoors and outdoors. She has taught at California State University (CSU) and at the City University of New York (CUNY). Business trips have taken her to Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mali, Pakistan, India and Iran. All these places have left traces in her work. Her installations, sometimes ephemeral, are published in numerous catalogs and books.
The former director of the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Raimund Stecker describes the artist’s method as follows: “Susanne Kessler constantly plays with separation and contact, closeness and distance, reality and illusion. The tangible is sometimes lost in the incomprehensible and the inconceivable becomes tangible, the chaotic becomes cosmic, the messy sometimes rational, and the certainties seem confused “.

Nele Probst. Since 1995 he lives and works in Berlin.
From 1989 to 1993 he studied Visual Communication, Fachhochschule für Gestaltung, Mannheim with Prof. Günter Slabon, Prof. Wolf Magin, Prof. Roland Fürst, Prof. Eckhard Neumann. From 1993 to 1995 he lived and worked in Hamburg.
In the works of Nele Probst, both in painting and in sculpture and installations, the additive process, understood as collection and thickening, plays an important role. The narrative moment and its associations are reflected both in the content and in the structure of his works. Color and material are in the foreground. His playful, experimental and sensitive relationship with materials and composition creates a sense of lightness and joy that characterizes his work and involves the viewer.

Marianne Stoll. Born in Darmstadt, lives and works in Berlin.
She studied art history with Prof. Uwe M. Schneede, Ludwig Maximilian Universität of Munich.
Through sculptures and drawings (…) Marianne Stoll explores in a playful but always serious, lucid and surprising way the many facets of living, of the house, of the origins – and of the constant threat of loss of a dwelling, of a shelter. In her compositions, Marianne recalls the question of how one should inhabit the World-Home, how to settle into this dwelling, which has not been handed over to humanity on a turnkey basis. With daring changes of perspective, the small and the large, the solid and the fragile, the dangerous and the harmless come together in the act of drawing (…) the graphic forms satisfy and nourish each other, in a strange analogy with creating a habitat for humans. (Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, from the text in the catalog “Dream Houses”)

Thanks to Giorgio Benni for photographs of the exhibition in slideshow.

VAA-Video Art Awards II Edition Italy-South Africa. CALL CLOSED

Theme “Interconnections: Legacy and Identity”. A very topical subject for this 2nd edition of the competition that Centro Di Sarro dedicates to artists under 45 who work with video and new media. Call CLOSED – UNDER SELECTION.

Luigi Di Sarro’s artwork in the big exhibition at Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. January 24th – October 13th 2019

About 100 works, between paintings, sculptures, graphics and photography, some of which have never been exhibited before or not exhibited for a long time, coming from the contemporary art collections of Rome – GAM.Galleria d’Arte Moderna and MACRO – to document how the female universe has always been the object a favorite of artistic attention, from an object to admire, as an angel or a temptress, to a mysterious subject who wonders about his identity up to the new image born of the contestation of the Sixties.

It’s Women. Body and image between symbol and revolution, exhibition that the Gallery of Modern Art hosts from January 24 to October 13, 2019. The exhibition path is accompanied by documentary material, video installations, photographic and film documents taken from cinematographic works and newsreels, as well as from performance videos and artist films.

In the series of portraits on the second floor of the exhibition stands out, among others, the face of Elisa, the wife of Giacomo Balla, portrayed while he turns to look at something or someone behind him. The iconic value of the image is enclosed in the look that changes the amazement in seduction and curiosity transforming the portrait of the young woman from an object to admire to a mysterious subject.

The exhibition itinerary is accompanied by video installations, photographic and filmic documents taken from cinematographic works and newsreels from the Bologna Film Library and the Istituto Luce-Cinecittà Archive which have overseen their implementation.

In a room of the exhibition is shown the film, produced by the Istituto Luce, Bellissima (2004) by Giovanna Gagliardi which, through historical documents of the Luce Archive, film clips, popular songs and interviews tells the story of women’s journey in the twentieth century .

The last section of the exhibition, dedicated to the dynamics and relationships between the developments of contemporary art, women’s emancipation and feminist struggles, presents documentary material from ARCHIVIA – Women’s Libraries Documentation Centers – and testimonies of performance and film artist of some protagonists of that fundamental season coming from private collections, important museums and public institutions (Museum of Rome in Trastevere, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – National Film Library, Galleria Civica of Modern Art Turin, MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto – Tullia Denza Archive).

GAM: Via Francesco Crispi, 24 – 00187 ROMA ITALY

web site: 
http://www.galleriaartemodernaroma.it