IRENE DIONISIO
IL PENSIERO IN MENO
IL PENSIERO IN MENO
Turin, Polo del ‘900
June 3-9, 2021
Exhibition views: © Irene Dionisio. Courtesy Polo del ‘900, Turin
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi
Irene Dionisio (Turin, 1986) starts from the following questions to conceive this exhibition: what space, role, and power does thought have in the western world today? Can thought operate inside a society that on one hand subtly continues to apply censorship and restrictions, and on the other transforms thought itself into a good and, if so, how?
The exhibition includes some works made between 2016 and 2021, and some created especially for this occasion.
In the entrance room, the poster Piccola Patria (2016) highlights how language and therefore thought can draw maps and outline physical spaces but also trace rigid boundaries and limits.
A pendant, the film Mondo Nuovo (2020) develops a similar reflection, on our gaze, on our way of looking at the world.
In the central room, the artist presents a new version of the performance Che l’assenza sia dichiarata (2019), which interprets the absence of Guy Debord from the First World Congress of Free Artists in Alba, Piedmont, in 1956 as an accusatory act and poetic declaration: life is more important than art, cinema is dead and we are just cultural ghosts with no real meaning. By leaving the autocue with Debord’s text inside his imaginary empty studio, ideally reconstructed with furniture, archival folders, objects, the accusatory thought expressed by the text is transformed into a harmless image, stripped of its author’s presence.
In the adjacent room, Il mio unico crimine è vedere chiaro nella notte (2018) instead deals with the topics of censorship in Italian cinema, imagining the fragments cut out of films by maestros of the seventh art.
The exhibition is rounded off by a new work, Parole di cocente attualità (2021), which testifies to the “sacrilegious” act of thinking: consisting of burning a book. The works consist of two books, a candle in a case, the ashes of a burnt book, the polaroids realized during the act, and the telegram sent by the artist to the curator announcing that act.