Until Dec. 6, Milan will host at the Fondazione Mudima, an exhibition titled ‘Vite sospese’ that combines works, in particular installations and videos by Italian artist and actor Alessandro Bergonzoni, and U.S. artist Bill Viola–a master of video art who passed away last July.
As exhibition curator Davide Di Maggio explained, the idea of juxtaposing the two artists arose “because both, although from different backgrounds and training, have always been concerned with the human condition, the uncertainty and risk that characterize man’s adventure in the cosmos. Both have felt the anguish that invariably rises from the depths of being and have given it voice and imagination.”
The exhibition opens with Bergonzoni’s installation titled “Attention! suspended assignments” which deals with “something that hangs over our souls,” a danger that hangs over the heads of all of us” because of our disregard for protecting the world we live in, explained the artist who accompanies his works with particularly elaborate and meaningful texts. In this regard, he says, “we cannot take on the pain of the world, otherwise how could we be in the world? But at least of those named Edmund, Sigismund and Ramon?…I guess we don’t want to, nor do we try. We could try not only to live them but to ‘share them’ so as to share weight, not the in-load.”
Another installation by Bergonzoni, “The Cradle of Incivility” focuses on surreal and paradoxical language. In the text accompanying the work Bergonzoni writes, “Coffins do not cradle, cradles do not float, in the universe now too ‘exterminated’ and seeded to children….”
At the end of the exhibition, Bergonzoni’s works meet ideally with those of Bill Viola, with “The Reflecting Pool”, the well-known videotape made between 1977 and 1979, which recounts the death and rebirth of the individual in the natural world, made up of virtual images, in which a man stands in the forest in front of a body of water. When he dives, time suddenly stops “crystallizing” into a series of events that turn into memories of reflected images.
Death, rebirth, saving oneself understood as the path of the soul, love, guarding nature and life itself are themes on which the work of the two artists is based and which prove to be particularly topical.
