DRAWN ONWARD is an exchange project between P/////AKT in Amsterdam (NL) and Progetto Diogene in Turin (IT). Both organisations operate on a non-for-profit basis and are interested in establishing a dialogue with emerging artistic talents. The aim of this collaboration is to share audiences, networks and experiences and to support and promote the work of artists on an international platform.

After a successful first collaboration in 2016, Progetto Diogene and P/////AKT – in partnership with Barriera – decided to continue the mutual collaboration in 2017 with a new edition of the exchange program. The artists invited for the project’s second edition are: Francesco Pedraglio (IT, lives and works in Mexico City) and Paul Geelen (NL, lives and works in Amsterdam). Each of them will spend a two-month residency period followed by a solo exhibition. The exchange project offers the artists the possibility to produce new work on location – conceived specifically for the given space and context – and to present it to an international audience.

Francesco Pedraglio – at P/////AKT, Amsterdam (NL)
Residency period: 1 April – 28 May 2017
Solo exhibition: 7 May – 4 June 2017.

Paul Geelen – at Progetto Diogene, Turin (IT)
Residency period: 24 April – 18 June 2017
Solo exhibition at Barriera: 9 June – 1 July 2017.

PAUL GEELEN
Chance Encounter

Barriera, via Crescentino 25 Turin
9 June – 1 July

Turin – On Thursday June 8 from 18.30 hrs at Barriera – via Crescentino 25 – the solo exhibition Chance Encounter by artist Paul Geelen will open to the public. The exhibition is the result of a collaborative project between Progetto Diogene and P/////AKT (Amsterdam) in the context of the exchange program DRAWN ONWARD.

Paul Geleen’s project, Chance Encounter, stems from an archaeological find a farmer discovered in 1877, when he was ploughing the fields in the countryside around Piacenza. The object, dubbed ‘Piacenza’s liver*’, is a bronze sculpture with Etruscan inscriptions depicting a sheep’s liver and was used for reading the stars.

In the display in Barriera exhibition space, the artist created his own life-size version of the Etruscan liver and opposite is an actual sheep’s liver lodged on a cooling surface specially made to preserve it.  The two objects speak of two, only apparently known, realities.

If, on the one hand, we know what the origin and use of Piacenza’s liver are, on the other, we may wonder how far our knowledge goes. Can we really interpret this object the same way as those who made it? And also the real liver. An organ we possess, which yet remains concealed. 

To these two objects Geleen adds another ‘known’ one: for the first time, he carved two black polystyrene blocks, two parallelepipeds. In his practice, the artist indeed employs a new material he has not used before in every exhibition. And so the polystyrene solids, cut with an incandescent blade, reveal residues that are charged with meaning. Almost as if they towered over the solid mass of the two parallelepipeds, whose shape recalls the two brain hemispheres. The ‘noble’ organ, Plato reminds us, that communicated with the rest of the body through the liver’s reflecting and shiny surface; a liver, as we have seen, that is used to see into the future. The artist further evokes this concept through the sound effect of a passing train: sound is movement,  the prime condition for the future.

*(a life-sized bronze model of a sheep’s liver covered in Etruscan inscriptions, II-I sec. B.C.)

Paul Geelen (1983)
lives and works in Amsterdam.
From 2004 to 2008 he studied at the AKV | St. Joost in Breda. In 2014 he completed his two-year residency at de Ateliers in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: A Minor State of Flux – Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2017), Sliding under traces – A Tale of Tub, Rotterdam (2016), Survival Blur – Grey Light Projects, Brussels (2015), Percussive Hunter – Akbank Sanat, Istanbul (2015), Axis Mundi (Art as a healing tool) – Moinsun, Paris (2015), The Hidden Picture – Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (2014), Offspring – de Ateliers, Amsterdam (2014) and Æon Flux at P/////AKT, Amsterdam (2014).

Photos by Cristina Leoncini

 

FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO
FADE IN from BLACK (abruptly)

P/////AKT, Amsterdam
7 may -4 jun 2017

It´s not night yet, but it’s definitely not day anymore. The whole scene might be permeated with a faint yet detectable scent of wet paint. Outside: a light  rain starts falling.

The voice-over:

imagine a series of abstract shapes. Picture
each and every one of these shapes respectively containing a smaller and being contained by
a larger one so that, when describing any of the aforementioned figures, you could already envisage the existence of both a predecessor and a successor. For instance…

Moving anti-clockwise (slowly):

a first man – maybe the protagonist of this story – starts talking about the making of a film around the idea of portraiture… a film where the main character

– a second man, which happens to be the first man’s alter ego – ends up not appearing in front of the camera at all, obliging the first man to imagine how a portrait of an absent person might look like. To do so, the first man asks for  the help of a third person, a photographer and an old-time friend of his. The solution is simple: to shoot the portrait of, let’s say, X and to do  so through Y (with Y being absent), well, they would shoot through the eyes of Z who, by knowing X, could better picture the absent Y.

Or more simply…

Reflective pause… then:

a group of men and women is invited to play “being actors” just by leaning against a wall of a gallery space during a performance. By doing so – as in: by “playing actors” – they play being the audience of that very same show. Finally…
Sparse signs of approval: someone is nodding, most stand still…

a man yawns loudly:

finally two equal and equally independent alphabets. One, the first one, is the alphabet of the teller. It could be noisy and complicated. But it could also be extremely entertaining, or moving. The second is the alphabet of the wanderer. It’s silent and schematic, borderline childish, but it has the same drive as the instinct to cover up your face when fearing a hit. Now  picture the two alphabets coexisting one in front of the other, as if mirrored. They both tell stories: a man or a honeybee or a chacma baboon or a spider-monkey or a woman or a group of people walking or running or leaning or sitting or standing still,

as if dead, etcetera…

The voice-over stop speaking and silence fills the room.
Someone is singing in the distance.

FADE to BLACK (slowly).

Keep the scene going with the screen totally black
(close your eyes!) Then: And one last time: CUT

Francesco Pedraglio is interested in storytelling as a tool to decode intimate encounters with both mundane and historically complex situations. He looks at how the process of narrating and staging – oneself, or a situation – influences the relationship between teller and listener, making visible the fantasies and fictions that constitute our reality.

The starting point of Pedraglio’s practice – being performance, sculpture, installation, prints, films – is writing. A curious detail, an overheard rumour, a banal incident, anything could spark some telling. And  it’s in the movement from the written text to the live action, from the live action to a staged installation or a film that the exploration of language, fiction and reality-making occurs.

Photos by Charlott Markus

 

Information about the partner organisations

P/////AKT is a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art that organizes and facilitates large scale solo presentations through which the audience gets the opportunity to gain insight in the thinking space of the artists.

Barriera

Barriera is a non-profit association located in Turin. It has been founded in 2007 by a group of contemporary art enthusiasts with the aim to promote initiatives, exhibitions and events in the field of contemporary art while encouraging the work of young international artists.

2016