EXHIBITIONS
Palazzo Biscari boasts an ancient tradition linked to art and exhibitions. Starting from the eighteenth century it hosted the museum of archaeological finds, physical instruments and natural rarities belonging to the collection of Ignazio Paternò Castello, fifth prince of Biscari, who until the last century occupied the rooms of the Biscari Museum.
Recently the Palace has also opened to innovative exhibitions by international artists, catalyzing the interest of citizens, tourists and the media. A very successful experiment that aims and replicates.
Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection at Palazzo Biscari
Environmental and collective installation by Ludovico Pratesi and Pietro Scammacca.
The project, curated by Ludovico Pratesi and Pietro Scammacca in collaboration with the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation and UNFOLD, is promoted by the Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale Foundation, chaired by Prof. Avv. Emmanuele FM Emanuele, and carried out in collaboration with Poema SpA, and avails itself of the support of the Sicily Foundation.
The works of the Collection occupy two parts of the building: an environmental installation by the artist Alicja Kwade in the Salone delle Feste and the group exhibition entitled “The analogous room” in the apartments of the Levante Wing of the building, open to the public for the first time. , which is proposed as an echo of a particular room in Palazzo Biscari: the room known as “Don Quixote” because it is decorated with paintings depicting the adventures of the picaresque character of Cervantes.
The exhibition brings together 20 artists from the Collection of different generations, who have implemented with their research a critique of representation through different languages and mediums. Inspired by narrative devices found in Cervantes’ novel – such as the critique of authority and the concept of authenticity – the works explore different structures of meaning, questioning the legitimacy of knowledge and truth.
Like Don Quixote, the artists move along the fine line that separates reality from fiction: ‘alienated in analogy’, they become ‘the disordered players of the Same and the Other’, to adopt Michel Foucault’s observations on the character of Cervantes.
The Gian Maria Tosatti exhibition at Palazzo Biscari.
From Monday 16 July to Saturday 18 August, exhibition by the artist Gian Maria Tosatti, My heart is empty as a mirror, at Palazzo Biscari in Catania.
The contemporary art exhibition at Palazzo Biscari is curated by Adele Ghirri, Ludovico Pratesi, Pietro Scammacca, and presented by Unfold (a non-profit cultural association based in Palazzo Biscari).
Exhibition
“My heart is empty like a mirror” title deriving from The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, presents itself as an allegorical and entropic space, where time seems to have ended or to continue in a further and separate dimension.
It constitutes the first chapter of a project that will take the artist on a long pilgrimage through Europe among the rubble of modern history that still stretches its shadows on the present, and the buds of a new time, perhaps a New History.
Tosatti’s work is proposed as a journey that the visitor will face individually, a sort of solitary journey whose beginning coincides with the entry into a new monumental visual novel.
Through a narrative inspired by the architecture of the building, but full of references to Visconti, Céline and his personal diaries, the artist orchestrates an immersive experience, to transform the building into a contemporary ruin, wearing down its genius loci. With the creation of a ghostly atmosphere, poised between presence and absence, past and future, Tosatti generates a temporal paradox that places the visitor in a sort of sepulcher of modernity, a crossing point between two radically different eras that can see us pass or fail.
The artist
Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980 – lives in New York) works mainly through large cycles of works that address issues related to the concept of identity, both on a political and spiritual level. The long-term projects carried out so far have led the artist to mainly use historic and monumental buildings to make powerful visual machines capable of developing themes deeply rooted in the reference communities and in the historical present.
These operations have sometimes triggered transformation processes of entire cities (Seven Seasons of the Spirit, Naples 2013-2016) or geographical areas (New Men’s Land, Nord-pas-de-Calais 2015-2016).
Tosatti has won numerous awards (Talent Prize, Terna Award, New York Award) and in 2015 the British magazine Art Review included him in the “Future Greats” ranking, placing him among the 30 most interesting international artists on the contemporary scene.