Ghosts of the past are useful for understanding the present: an exhibition at Madre in Naples

Opening Oct. 5 and on view through Nov. 14, 2022 at Madre in Naples is the exhibition Spectres: palimpsests of memory, curated by Kathryn Weir. For the first time in the exhibition spaces of the Madre museum, a selection of the latest works that have become part of the collection is presented along with others that have never been exhibited. These include acquisitions made with the support of the Campania Region (POC Funds - COMPLEMENTARY OPERATIONAL PROGRAMME 20-21), donations from artists and important victories of calls such as the Italian Council, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. Ibrahim Mahama ’s work was the winner of the public notice PAC2020 - Plan for Contemporary Art promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The thematic approach allows to offer insights and create new frameworks to renew the look at the permanent collection. The works on display, produced by artists of different generations and backgrounds, are united by an attempt to open a space traversed by the spectres that haunt the environment in which we live. The works are inhabited by erased or suppressed histories, becoming a means to make visible what is poised between presence and absence, past, contemporaneity and future. Through elemental materials (water, earth, metal, light, stone) and archetypes of lived experience (home, family, street, work, sacred place, music, nature), the artists in the exhibition interrogate the relationship between traces of individual and shared experiences.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida points out how history and life as such are always already haunted by ghosts and how to look to the future it is necessary to begin again in memory of that “impure history of ghosts.” The intellectual of tomorrow should learn à vivre by learning and teaching, not to make conversation with the ghost, but to entertain with him, with her, to let him or her speak, albeit within himself, in the other, to the other in himself: the ghosts are always there, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet."

The artists in the exhibition are Betty Bee (Naples, 1963); Gregorio Botta (Naples, 1953); Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975); Lino Fiorito (Ferrara, 1955); Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, UK, 1956); Ibrahim Mahama (Tamale, Ghana, 1987); Raffaela Mariniello (Naples, 1962); Raffaela Naldi Rossano (Naples, 1990); Gloria Pastore (Naples, 1946); Elisa Sighicelli (Turin, 1968); Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980).

on the occasion of the opening, Raffaela Mariniello’s film ZioRiz, which joins the collection, was shown for the first time in Naples. The film was produced by Teatri Uniti with Casa del Contemporaneo with contributions from the Campania Regional Government and Film Commission Regione Campania, in collaboration with Museo Madre, Studio Trisorio and Zona Rosa.

For info: madrenapoli.it

Image: Ibrahim Mahama, Alhassan Zepligu (2015-2020). Project winner of the public notice PAC2020 - Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Ghosts of the past are useful for understanding the present: an exhibition at Madre in Naples

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