BRUSSELS.- The Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels, in collaboration with MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, presents the installation Rest Your Eyes by Italian artist Rebecca Moccia, on display from 10 December 2021 to 7 January 2022.
The project is among the winners of Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, an open call supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and the Ministry of Culture (MiC) that was launched in September 2020 with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art abroad.
Rest Your Eyes is a transmedia installation featuring a news broadcast on mute, as well as two audio speakers located throughout the space and connected to multi-language web radio stations. Disturbing yet familiar like the distant and distorted chronicles coming from the speakers, the images have been blurred and made unrecognisable through a digital filter created by the artist.
“Some artworks offer themselves as theoretical places. Rest Your Eyes is one of them and interpellates the viewer right from its title. The invitation to ‘rest your eyes’ is not meant to impose a sensory deprivation, yet to review the privilege that images and the gaze have always had in Western culture." Through a constant visual tension given by the attempt to distinguish shapes and narratives, the artist investigates the "infodemic that tires the eye and pollutes the mind, but also a new dimension of public intimacy", states Annalisa Pellino, author of the critical text that accompanies the exhibition.
In her research, Rebecca Moccia explores the materiality of perceptual and emotional states that can arise from certain features of physical and social spaces. She creates context-specific works defined as "media atmospheres" that surround the body, but also cross and interact with it. In Rest Your Eyes, "as a reaction to the de-materialisation of the Self and of the Other, which has characterised our perception of the world in the last two years, Moccia places materiality back at the centre of human relationships,” considering the installation as “a liminal space of transition, where a polyphony of voices transforms the surface of the image, reverberates in space, and excites the human soul.”
Rebecca Moccia (Naples, 1992) is an Italian trans-disciplinary artist. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, among the most recent: Blast. Estetiche della violenza tra immagine video e movimento (“Aesthetics Of Violence Between Video Image and Movement”), Palazzo Poste Verona 2021; There Is No Time to Enjoy The Sun, Morra Greco Foundation 2021; Back to London, Mazzoleni London 2020; Da qui tutto bene (“From Here Everything Is Fine”), Museo Novecento Firenze 2019; Cuore (“Heart”), Toast Project Space 2019; Laboratorio Aperto (“Open Laboratory”), XXIV CSAV, Antonio Ratti Foundation 2018. In 2021 she was the winner of the international research grant, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council program. In 2020 she was artist fellow at Castro projects (Rome), artist in residence at Casa degli Artisti (Milan) and winner of the open call Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere (MAECI-DGSP / MiC-DGCC). Rebecca Moccia is one of the founding members of AWI - Art Workers Italia.
