ROME.- Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, under the aegis Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, has extended Luca Lo Pinto's contract as artistic director until the end of the year: Lo Pinto’s project, Museum for Preventive Imagination, will continue throughout 2024 to give form to the programming of the museum.
With Museum for Preventive Imagination MACRO has taken on the experimental guise of a magazine, as a method of investigation of the work of artists and tool of interpretation of contemporary culture.
Season after season, every exhibition space of the museum has narrated, under the title of an entrance banner – Solo/Multi, Arrhythmics, Polyphony, Bibliographic Office, Chamber Music, In-Design, Rehearsal and Retrofuture – a specific medium or point of view, often bringing out unusual stories and figures to offer viewers a pathway to follow in relation to their own personal discoveries, curiosities and free associations.
The first part of 2024 will feature a new programme of exhibitions that reformulate the sections of Museum for Preventive Imagination, with a multidisciplinary approach and different focal points connected to the city of Rome.
Opening on 9 February, the museum presents the exhibitions 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS by the Paris-Berlin duo BLESS, and Triviale by the Rome- based French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, together with the Feel Good Cooperative, as well as new projects by Michela de Mattei, Chiara Enzo, Sara Leghissa and Gabriele Silli for Retrofuture, the exhibition in progress for three years through which to envision the future collection of the museum with young Italian artists.
25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS is an exhibition dedicated to the Paris and Berlin based duo, BLESS, a transdisciplinary studio working on the edges of fashion, product design and conceptual gestures. Constituting the first institutional show in Italy dedicated to the work of the self-dubbed “situation designers” Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, founders of the label, the presentation will allude to over 25 years of products, situations, and collaborations, all set in a newly conceived environment, that reflects a 360° of all the shiny and the shady sides of always stress with BLESS.
Triviale presents the outcomes of the ongoing collaboration between French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980) and the Feel Good Cooperative, founded in Rome in 2020 by the artist herself and composed of a group of Colombian sex workers and their allies, including photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and architect and researcher Serena Olcuire. The exhibition will consist of a theatrical set in which the public and the domestic nature of sex work are enacted and humorously elaborates on themes of gender identity, migration, the legacy of colonialism, as well as self-representation and self-determination.
The protagonists of the exhibitions that will open on 21 March include the
German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, and the Italian artist and designer Luigi Serafini.
The large solo show for the upcoming season, on the artist Elisabetta Benassi, will open on 9 May. Starting on 30 May, the museum presents monographic exhibitions on two other women with ties to Rome, the poet Patrizia Cavalli and the Californian artist who has spent long periods of time in the city, Marcia Hafif.
The second part of the year will feature various initiatives and will lead to the conclusive group exhibition of Museum for the Preventive Imagination, a special edition of the museum-magazine that will spread into all the spaces of MACRO, layering itself over the original architecture of the museum.
Museum for Preventive Imagination
Since its launch in 2020, Museum for Preventive Imagination has presented more than 50 exhibitions, with solo shows by Nathalie Du Pasquier, Tony Cokes, Jason Dodge, Cinzia Ruggeri, Diego Perrone, and the group show In First Person Plural. It has investigated unconventional figures such as Wolfgang Stoerchle, Mario Diacono, Lisa Ponti, among others. It has explored the work of artists such as Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller, Salvo, Jochen Klein, showing their impact on the practices of other artists. It has presented the experiments of musicians or record labels like Edition Mego, Fatima Al Qadiri, and Pauline Oliveros as art objects. It has invited graphic designers, including Boy Vereecken, Vier5, Åbake, to present their practices in exhibition form. The museum has created a space devoted the universe of publications, such as the magazine Playmen, the publishing house Hanuman Books, and the magazine WET, founded by Leonard Koren. It has offered a “rehearsal space” where contemporary artists, including Soshiro Matsubara, Anna-Sophie Berger, Eva Barto, have had the opportunity to test their works in progress. It traced connections between the city of Rome and the careers of major international artists such as Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, and invited Lawrence Weiner to create a work to be exhibited in the sky of the Roman coastline.
The museum’s current exhibitions are the retrospective of Emilio Prini …E Prini; Vicolo della Penitenza 11/A, curated by Janice Guy, with Michel Auder, Sarah Charlesworth, DW Fitzpatrick, Gary Hume, On Kawara, Julian Lethbridge, Sarah Lucas, Reinhard Mucha, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Meyer Vaisman, Lawrence Weiner, Franz West and Christopher Wool; The Bidet and the Jar by Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel; Depth of field by Alexander Brodsky; Hear Alvin Here by Alvin Curran; AUTONOMIARTEPOVERARCHIZOOMEMPHISUPERSTUDIOPERAISMO by
Experimental Jetset; Barrikadenwetter. Image Acts of Insurrection, curated by
the Arsenale Institute, Venice, and Retrofuture. Notes for a collection, with works by more than 30 young Italian artists.
Upcoming exhibitions:
BLESS: 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS
9/2/24 – 12/5/24
Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative: Triviale
9/2/24 – 12/5/24
Michela de Mattei, Chiara Enzo, Sara Leghissa, Gabriele Silli: Retrofuture. Notes for a Collection
From 9/4/24
