A major exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria dedicated to video games as a tenth art form

From July 22, 2022 to January 15, 2023, the Halls of Arts of the Reggia di Venaria will open up to the world of video games: in fact, the exhibition PLAY. Videogames, Art and Beyond, curated by Fabio Viola, lecturer, author of essays and founder of the international art collective TuoMuseo, and Guido Curto, director of the Consortium of Royal Residences of Savoy.

The major exhibition will investigate video games as the"tenth art form" practiced by 3 billion people worldwide, recognizing the profound impacts in contemporary society of a creative sector still often perceived as a world of playful escapism and mere pastime. Video games represent a creative space where ideas and visions are born, a meta art form in which architecture, painting, sculpture, music, performing arts, poetry, cinema, and comics coexist, giving rise to layered collective worlds.

In the twelve rooms of the exhibition itinerary, digital canvases by the great masters of video games will enter into dialogue with celebrated masterpieces of the past and present, inviting the public to reflect on the new aesthetics, cultures, languages, politics and economies of the 21st century. For the first time, the influences of the great masters of the past, such as De Chirico, Hokusai, Doré, Savinio, Piranesi, Kandinsky, and Warhol, on the aesthetics of video games such as Ico, Monument Valley, Rez Infinite, Okami, and Apotheon will be highlighted. The convergence of static image, moving image, and interactive image will be the focus of the PlayArt space, which will lead the visitor to relate to living artists such as Bill Viola, Banksy, Invaders, Cao Fai, Jago, Tabor Robak, the AES+F collective, and Federico Clapis, who have drawn on the language of the video game to create some of their material and digital works. After the rooms related to aesthetic and symbolic influences, the video game becomes contemporary mythology, the last link in a testimonial chain that began more than 4,000 years ago with the Epic of Gilgamesh passing through the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy until reaching recent times with Star Wars, the Matrix and Harry Potter. The two rooms devoted to the themes of Eros and Thanatos then present visitors with ten video games that have generated profound impacts in the lives of millions of people through new interactive forms of writing, such as Florence, Death Stranding, To The Moon, and The Graveyard.

The Hall of Masters celebrates some of the pioneers of video games, from Yoshitaka Amano, iconic designer of Final Fantasy to game designer Yu Suzuki, from screenwriter Christian Cantamessa to Piedmontese Andrea Pessino, founder of the American Ready at Dawn who worked on God of War, Okami, and Dexter. Closing out the room is one of the musicians who has made his mark on the history of video games, Jesper Kyd with whom Assassin’s Creed melodies are associated.

Today, video games also represent a social and political laboratory: one can play Paper, Please, Riot, This War of Mine and these will return profound reflections on the times to come. The penultimate room is designed to become an interactive and sensory space: the reconstruction of four environments, ranging from a Japanese arcade of the early 1980s to the future Metaverse, tell the evolutionary chronology of video games and offer visitors the chance to play with Pacman, Street Fighter and Space Invaders booths, but also to confront the most recent video game productions before donning visors and catapulting themselves into the future. The Homo Ludens space will be enriched by the collaboration with Lucca Comics & Games, which has lent original and signed plates by the masters of international pop culture such as Jim Lee and Michael Whelan, illustrators of Batman, Captain Tsubasa, and Superman.

The exhibition is part of the larger 2022 schedule dedicated to gaming with which Venaria Reale is celebrating its first 15 years of opening to the public.

For more info: lavenaria.it

A major exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria dedicated to video games as a tenth art form

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