LOREDANA LONGO "CAGES"

LOREDANA LONGO

CAGES
video/ installations/ perfomance

CURATOR
ANTONIO AREVALO

opening

FRIDAY 19 MARCH FROM 17,00

RUE DES CHEVALIERS 22–1050 BRUXELLES


|| open through 19.03.10 19.05.10 ||


info
art director rosa anna musumeci
available Monday- Sunday by appointment
space rue des chevaliers 22/ 2nd floor -1050 Bruxelles

contact
info@artecontemporaneact.com
www.artecontemporaneact.com
www.artesud.it
BE +32(0)491251133 IT +39330692388
FR +33(0)140159921 +33(0)603597288


Loredana Longo (1967) lives and works in Catania (Italy)
The artist’s research started from a thorough reflection on her own image, portrayed by photography, installations, videos, and performances. Later on, this work of a strictly autobiographic variety was taken a step ahead by focussing on the family’s universe, whose manifold contradictions are vividly represented by Loredana. Tensions and conflicts emerging at home, as accounted for by the Explosion project, allow the artist to go through the whole range of the most complex psychological and social dynamics. Carefully displayed domestic settings are suddenly and traumatically blown up and then faithfully rebuilt by reassembling the damaged pieces. All stages of the deconstruction/reconstruction process are video-taped and endlessly replicated in loop. Thus, the domestic-private environment becomes a multifaceted battleground, and an archetypal model of social relationships at large.
Her first solo show in Brussels will be curated by Antonio Arévalo and provides a new focus, as effectively epitomized by the title. CAGES explicitly alludes to strictly personal inner anguishes, aptly embodied by a claustrophobic jail. Both the body and the social setting fade away or, more properly, take a new shape, of unusual symbolic strength. Behind the bars, a painful rite of self-annihilation and self-acknowledgement takes place: unfree as it is, the Ego accepts to identify with the cage, as a cage is after all needed to escape, to grasp the notion, and to seize the opportunity, of an escape. A real opportunity, though? Or just the illusion of? Indeed, the cages shine: their bars, their mirrors, their dazzling light bulbs are designed to emphasize a frightening glamour, both attractive and repulsive; and the whole scenery amounts to an architectonic trompe-l’œil, whereby spaces are endlessly multiplied and multipliable by the desire for freedom, while staying inexorably poky when one effectively tries to trespass them. After all – the artist suggests – way outs are not readily available, they are perhaps just virtual exits; and the real ones are possibly not even looked for, since the individual might be convinced (and happy) that freedom is nothing more than a sensation, a state of mind.

the curator
Antonio Arévalo born in Chile lives and works in Rome from 1975. Poet, independent consultant, art curator, has directed many important international projects, exhibitions, events on behalf of prominent private and public institutions, museums, and galleries in Italy, Chile, France, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, USA, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Curator of the Chilean Pavillion at the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2009).

the gallery
After a more than decennial activity in Catania – Italy, ARTECONTEMPORANEA runs presently a new space in Brussels (Rue des Chevaliers 22 – 1050 Ixelles), with the aim of pushing ahead the association’s basic mission: to promote young artists, either established or not, under the lead of renowned and research-oriented curators; to foster the international exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas; to develop cooperation and mutual support with Italian public and private institutions within the EU context; to create a continuous supply of information and initiatives devoted to widen the audience of contemporary visual research; to provide assistance and training to artists and curators through residential stages at its venue.