Do you happen to be around Treviso and wish to see some refreshing perspectives over The First World War? Come and Visit us!

June 29th – August the 5th 2017 / Vernissage: June, Thursday 29th at 07:00 p.m. / @ the exhibition space  TRA,  by Ca’ Dei Ricchi, via Barberia 25  (Treviso, Italy)

The exhibition has no entry fee, and is accessible from Monday to Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to 01:00 p.m. & from 03:30 p.m. to 07:30 p.m. Special openings on Sunday from 5:00 pm to 8:00 p.m. with guided tour.

As written by IoDeposito:

“Organic Memory is an exhibition that deals with the contemporary legacy of the World Wars through the voice of international artists. The artworks presented at Ca ‘dei Ricchi communicate among them and with the visitors through the languages of sculpture, ready made, video art and photography, all united by a constant, implicit or manifest, recall to the soil.  The exhibition itinerary is thought as a constant dialogue between an interior and an exterior space, in a dichotomy between the intimacy of the home walls – which lose their reassuring character because of the conflict – and an open space where the ground, which is first of all a battlefield, can instead play a protective role. Thus, the space opens up to an apparently comfortable area where the british artist Victoria Lucas involves the audiece in a reflection on war and commemoration, through a video where the mud – in which every scene takes place – becomes a commemorative substance that embodies the human experience and trauma of war. Next to Lucas’s artwork there are the photographs of the young chinese artist Ting Bao, in which memory and memories emerge thanks to a postproduction work on the film, on which the artist deposits soil and organic elements, leaving the impression of a memory that has to be rediscovered. Anitra Hamilton and Cosima Montavoci complete this intimate space exhibiting artworks that evoke human fragility, through an ironic dialogue between conflict and death. The shovels of Sisyphean Task – by the slovene sculptor Boris Beja – recall a soil that can also hide, protect and suffocate, as the mud in Lucas work. Beja presents – with his ready made – what a war object is, after a careful reflection. Placed in the second part of the itinerary, a sort of open space reconstructed, this object appears to be highly symbolic, as it is incapable of fulfilling its function. The ground evoked by Beja is a natural element also well known to Ilisie Remus: with his ready made the artist proposes key elements of the soldier’s uniform combined with soil, dirt and wood, bringing an ambivalent meaning. In fact, the material objects absorb mourning and incorporates memory, giving birth to something new, that is organic and strictly linked to life. Nathalie Vanheule‘s ashes serves as a symbolic elements of the conflict: it is suffocating, but it is also linked to fire and therefore to purification and rebirth. Finally, the work of Cambodian Lang Ea is a sculpture made up of a stack of twenty extremely realistic heads, posed in silent stasis and characterised by changing expressions. This is a heavy and at the same time very delicate material installation that leads to a reflection on human nature and our bond with the earth. The exhibition intends to stimulate a reflection on the ambivalence of every conflict and on the importance of memory, as a necessity for human existence. This memory is not merely a distant and impalpable re-elaboration of human experience, but becomes organic, tangible, as it is related to the concepts of soil, identity and belonging. The testimony of war, experienced in first hand or through our legacy, can thus open up a dialogue aimed at metabolizing and transmitting a memory that must not be just hidden and individual, but requires collective involvement”

To see the original article click here

Tomb Sculpture - The Artwork

The work selected for this show is Tomb Sculpture, a serie of 4 sculptures that present themselves as roundish yellow objects covered in spikes. The spikes are casts of human teeth, revealing the root instead of the crown. Although the title would normally suggest the end of a life, in this case it represents the end of a gesture, the action of filling up, and it is presented as ‘the remains of an action’.

“An ossuary, a place where bones are kept in order to conserve the remnants of a human body, it often consists in a cell or a small church, where once the skeletons are gathered they lose any ref- erence to a single person. After great catastrophes the number of bones was often so large that they were hanged on any surface available, resulting in spectacular decorations of sacred interiors with a mixture of ironic and macabre connotations. Cosima Montavoci’s Tomb Sculpture, share the same attitude by covering the crust of undefined rounded sculptures with casts of her own teeth. The constant memento mori, which accompanies our daily life through the aging and decay of our body, it is here re- versed by using human spoilages to fill a temporal gap by means of repeating a gesture.”

Emma Panza - Curator at De Appel Arts Centre.

“The sculptures of the Tomb Sculpture series, realised by Cosima Montavoci, are born from the desire to evoke the ancient custom of the ossuaries, places where the exhumed remains of deceased people were piled - places that are, in some ways, symbol of individuals' depersonalization after death. Taking from history and ancient traditions the idea that bones can be used as ornaments of atavistic power, the artist puts them in her work in a both serious and ironic way and introduces a pulsing question on the symbols of our spirituality, among which bones stand out firmly: fearful harbingers of the constant decadence of our body, yet immortal witnesses of the past. The work reveals more and more, as the viewer approaches to it: the surface is covered by casts of the artist's teeth.”

IoDeposito

Ca’ dei Ricchi - The Venue

It's a historic noble building in Treviso, a city close by Venice. Built in the second half of the fifteenth century by Azzoni Avogadro (or Avogaro), the palace became the headquarters of the College of Nobles, for a time was the town hall, then for a while has been used as a girls’s school. The building is Gothic and he facade that looks out on Via San Gregorio is richly decorated with beautiful floral motifs. Similar, but to a lesser degree, it is the other facade facing Via Barberia. In the city of Treviso is believed that Ca ' dei Ricchi is "the most finely building treated as any other era, where it is done fairly abundant use of Istrian stone, and most closely resembles the contemporary types of Venetian Gothic".

This great location finally finds its role in home for Contemporary Art, and as a matter of fact, until April 2017 Ca’ dei Ricchi hosted An Exhibition from Jackson Pollock.