NEWS

DISTURBING NARRATIVES

Parkview Museum, Singapore
a cura di Lorand Hegyi,

26/6/2019 – 8/2/2020

Installations and works by:
Urs Lüthi, William Kentridge, Hermann Nitsch, Barthélémy Toguo, Rosemarie Trockel, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Orlan, Bernard Roig, Tinus Vermeersch, Gloria Friedmann, Paolo Grassino, Gary Hill, Nina Kovacheva, Per Dybvig, Lois Weinberger, Wang Yuping, Yoo Geun-Taek ….

In the installation “The Ghost of History” Italian artist Andrea Fogli presents a series of 59 terracotta heads, previously exhibited in Rome in Museo della via Ostiense at Porta SanPaolo (2016), a space highly symbolic for the Italian anti-fascist movement, and then in the Chiesa del Carmine – Museo Lanfranchi in Matera, European city of Culture (2018).

As stated by the artist, the work originates from the need of placing humanity at the centre of his artistic research: through the individual facial expression of each one of the heads, all created by imagination and not directly from photos or reality, the viewers delve into a personal and unique micro-story each head is associated with. Viewers experience a process of identification through which they can further explore the human existential condition. As a reaction against the indifference and superficiality of our contemporary society, the artist sheds light on these individual stories which should not be confined into the oblivion and, on the contrary, should be remembered and narrated. The faces presented in this installation could be faces of migrants, victims of war, human beings persecuted by any kind of violence or even just forgotten.

As stated by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, that wrote the introduction of the book “Diary of powder and clay” that collect pictures and artist’s texts about this series of works, “the 59 faces are not portraits, but presences, almost auras that look at us from an unbearable distance; they are faces without bodies but so full of expression that we don’t miss them….. The expression of the face does not say, but calls, it is not a message, but a name. For this reason, it is always already in flight from the face, towards the missing name, that these faces of clay and graphite call with all their quiet fury. Anonymous, they require us to name them”. (press release by Parkview Museum)