Stefano Cagol
Anthropization
THE OTHERS FAIR
November 2-5, 2017
Opening: November, 2 opening party, 8.00 PM. – 1.00 AM.
November 3- 4, 5.00 PM – 1.00 AM.
November 5, 5.00 PM – 8.00 PM.
EX OSPEDALE MARIA ADELAIDE
Lungo Dora Firenze, 87
10153, Turin, Italy
Room 13, Pink Corridor
First floor
curated by Glenda Cinquegrana
In Anthropization the man’s influence over nature and history is the main concept through which Stefano Cagol’s inquiry can be read. Starting with his work on the border issue, passing through his reflections on the melting of the glaciers, until his latest artworks focusing on bioethics and the drama of history, Anthropization is a curatorial project by Glenda Cinquegrana featuring an ‘excursus’ through the most brilliant and famous Cagol’s production. We are featuring a small group of museum-quality works that have never been exhibited into an art fair before.
The first artwork is by the title Ice Monolith (2013), a video featured at Venice Biennale in 2013, documenting the performance in which Cagol is moving from the Alps to Venice a 1.400 kilos ice block. The video shows the ice block melting in a very few hours. This artwork, alluding to the climate change and its consequences over our ecosystem, was exhibited for the Maldives Pavilion, a country permanently put at risk of existence by global warming.
Light Dissolution (2008) has triggered one of the most famous works by Cagol, ‘The End of the Border’, in which Cagol deals with the border issue. This photograph dates back to the performance Cagol featured at Manifesta 7, in which by using an electrical generator he traced a new border of light crossing different countries. The border, conceived as a human intervention on the territory, has recently turned out as a key issue of our troubled political times.
Acquired in MART in Rovereto, Karlsruhe, and Kunstraum in Innsbruck collections, September 11th (2009) is an installation visualizing by means of texts and images one of the most dramatic dates of contemporary history. Listing all the events that happened long before the American 9/11, the installation is renovating all the metaphorical meanings attributed to this date. Among those facts, we can find on the same level of meaning Pinochet’s golpe in Argentina, the failed death attempt to Mussolini, as well as the artist’s birth. Putting in relationship different events, both humourous and dramatic, Cagol gives us a deeper reflection on the meaning of contemporary history.
LOLA Cow (2009) deals with the bioethics, biodiversity and eugenics issues. Lola, whose name was originally heralding domestic animals, is a typical and standardized name shared off on different animals’ skins: the repeated word becomes the metaphor of the perfect animal and also of extreme experiments conducted on the animals.