From Banksy to Luc Besson, Warhol to David Lynch: music and video meet in Siena exhibition

From August 10 to November 4, 2018, Santa Maria della Scala in Siena will host the exhibition Music for the Eyes. Interferences between video art, pop music, and video clips. It is a project that aims to analyze the contamination between video art and pop music through three sections: the first section focuses on video art and sees pop music as a tool for interpreting contemporary culture, with works by video artists such as Francesco Vezzoli, Pipilotti Rist, Martin Creed, AES, Robert Boyde Jesper Just; the second section presents awide selection of video clips made by famous film directors, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Luc Besson, Derek Jarman, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, and Wim Wenders, all of whom served important musicians in the making of their video clips; the third and final section presents fourteen video clips made by some of the most significant and subversive contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst, Vanessa Beecroft, Keith Haring, Andres Serrano, Banksy, and Andy Warhol.

Luca Quattrocchi, curator of the event, explains, "The exhibition starts from an in-depth analysis of Pop Music and how it surrounds us with its visual imagery, persuasive and penetrating, and how it intervenes in daily life by helping to define and modify social relations, aesthetic trends, collective tastes; to suggest mental attitudes, behavioral patterns, political opinions, in a dense web of sound that seems to become increasingly visible and palpable."

Daniele Pitteri, director of Santa Maria della Scala comments, “The twentieth century and this glimpse of the twenty-first century, has been the era in which the visual and auditory dimensions have gradually sought each other out, approached each other, and then finally merged. If the advent of sound cinema in some ways constitutes the beginning of this partnership, it is from the 1960s, with the advent of pop music on the international scene, that it begins to be disruptive. The new music, the music that millions of young people around the world love, is not just made of notes. It is also made of symbols and of musicians/star performers who use their bodies as an element of communication and relationship with the audience. Music made not only to be heard, but also to be seen. The birth of the video clip, although preceded by other forms of audiovisual representation, not only definitively enshrines this inescapable link, but also offers new expressive possibilities to other art forms. And pop music becomes the connecting/inspiring element for artists, directors, video artists who investigate new forms of expression, starting precisely from the sublimation of the musician/star’s body. With Music for the Eyes we want to investigate precisely these links, this mixture of expressions that in turn generate new forms, possibilities for experimentation, in many extreme, precisely because they fully explore the potential of the fusion between the auditory and visual dimensions.”

For all information you can visit the official website of Santa Maria della Scala by clicking here.

Pictured: Adel Abidin, Three Love Songs (2010; Videostill. Courtesy: Adel Abidin)

From Banksy to Luc Besson, Warhol to David Lynch: music and video meet in Siena exhibition

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