China - Feng Feng
In the current of new independent Chinese art, Feng Feng has a place of his own due to his ability to interpret the iconic strength of certain great visual symbols. His smoking or illuminated brain, for example, is a reliable sculpture that speaks about us. He conceived it at a time when he was desperately trying to give up smoking and his mind was obsessed by the idea of a cigarette: hence this porcelain object (a lucid organic material that excellently expresses the gelatinous consistency of a brain), in which lit incense sticks are inserted so that smoke issues from many little holes. Instead the brain that lights up is a table lamp, currently a prototype, which the artist is designing for the Chinese equivalent of Ikea. His Ming Palace (2008-9) is an important public work of vegetal architecture in which an entire small wood, planted on the site where an imperial palace of the Ming dynasty once stood, has been shaped by pruning into the form of the building that no longer exists; as they grow, the plants continuously tend to escape from these imposed boundaries, altering the lines of the architecture, and the job of keeping them recognisable with periodic pruning implies an exercise of memory and rethinking that cannot only be done once, as in the case of bronze monuments, but must be constant and continuous, entrusting it always to the awareness of new people.
With his wife Biao Biao, who is also an artist, Feng Feng has produced an exhibition entitled Canton/Canton, an experiment in dialogue with the creativeness of the public through the famous “rabbit or duck?” image made known by studies of the psychology of perception.
The W fountain, presented at OPEN 14 in dialogue with the event Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art, needs no explanations: its theme is certainly the pollution created in China by the spread of western fast-food; but the playful delicacy of the piece, and the underlying sympathy that the artist reveals for the colour and shape of this American symbol, which despite everything is so successfully iconic and visually captivating, denote a very up to date sensitivity.
Text by
Gloria Vallese
Bangladesh - Ronni Ahmmed
The Tomb of Qara Köz recalls the campaign - from the maternal matrix/womb to entropic little deaths/tomb, at tangents and accords with transformative desire - of the Mughal princess Qara Köz who exerted powerful influence in the Florence of the Medici. The Tomb is organized in three planes: the multifarious narrative of Qara Köz established in the collective imagination, by Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and by the films Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Jodha Akbar (2008), is (trans)located between realities in form of a performative architecture to activate an open network - and commons of emotion and memory - of Bengali (illegal) immigrants who are impacting the psycho-geographical tapestry of Venice. The second plane, springing from the shifting layer of associations - e.g. the main body of the pyramid consisting of 1254 glasses recalls Calvino’s Marco Polo - invoking the tales of fluid Venice(s); the cartoonish drawings on each egg employ fragments of Jacopo Bassano, Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Farinati to tell the tale of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio’s adventures, Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in search of purity, Mahler reading Li Tai-Po. The Tomb’s third plane pays homage to Ai Weiwei’s Documenta 12’s project, Fairytale, and invites 101 Bengalis and records/transmits their secret desires as these new immigrants pay alms and prays to the Tomb of Qara Köz to make their wishes to come true. The Tomb of Qara Köz, in an uninhibited polyphenomenality of display, evidences lived live(s) in transformation, in polyphony; its synthetic/syncretic approach, rooted in Opera Aperta, like traditional Bengali theater, attempts to stage a conceptual mise en abyme.
Text by
Ebadur Rahman
Albania - Alfred Milot Mirashi
Anatomy of a miraculous key
You can use a key to open or to close. This great key-sculpture by Alfred Milot Mirashi was made to open. If every lock has its key, this one is universal. It works anywhere in the world, at any cultural latitude, irrespective of the traditional local symbology. But it does have one limit. It only works when an obstacle on the route to peace must be thwarted, in the meeting between religions and cultures. In favour of dialogue and peace, this mass of iron comprised of solids and voids becomes miraculously light, captivating, penetrating, in keeping with its “phallic” symbology. It is not a blasphemous key. What works this miracle is only art. In short, something human. When art is not rhetorical, decorative, celebrative, or a repetition of exhausted and nauseating forms, it has surprising social effects. We may well hope that Milot’s key will go around the world. On the occasion of the now well-known and established OPEN, the Venetians and their film-loving visitors will certainly pause before this striking sculpture. Oldenburg has scattered throughout the world his enormous pliers, clothes pegs and other everyday objects (an expression that recalls Duchamp). Pop. Like the theory of New Realism of the late, great Pierre Restany, it would be written in some simplifying book. A heresy. And it would be a heresy to involve the American concerning this key. It is antipope in the way it is distorted with respect to its “everyday” morphology. Though animated and tense (a macro-work), its exaggeration here becomes exasperation. It is not supported by emphasis, but by the interest in a form that is “expressive” rather than declaratory, in its irregular, anticlassical twisted anatomy. And tormented. Like all people who reach out, body and soul, in their yearning for peace. Years ago the Italians received a mini-calculator, a gift from the Prime Minister. Couldn’t the United Nations find some way of spreading this message of art and peace?
Text by
Carmelo Strano