Milan, at the Mudima Foundation in dialogue the works of Alessandro Bergonzoni and Bill Viola

The Mudima Foundation in Milan is hosting from Oct. 29 to Dec. 6, 2024, the exhibition Vite sospese (Suspended Lives), featuring works by Alessandro Bergonzoni (Bologna, 1958) and Bill Viola (New York, 1951 - Long Beach, 2024). Curated by Davide Di Maggio, the exhibition starts from the idea that both artists, despite having different backgrounds and origins, have always explored the themes of the human condition,uncertainty and risk that mark the human experience in the cosmos. Both have given form and imagination to the deep sense of anguish that emerges from being.

The exhibition is structured in three distinct moments and environments. Bergonzoni’s installations occupy the first two floors, and only at the end is there an ideal and intended encounter between Bill and Alessandro, in a symbolic and metaphysical place that represents the threshold between invisible and visible.

The exhibition route begins with Alessandro Bergonzoni ’s installation entitled Attention! Suspended Assignments, which serves as a warning to all terrestrial “sailors,” almost as if to say, “Watch out, watch yourselves from above!” Something looms over our heads; such perception reminds us how we have not taken care of the “roof of the world” to save ourselves and protect, from the beginning, what matters.

From this apparent elsewhere, inaccessible to most people, we move to another plane, where we are invited to cross a boundary of the imaginary. Here the audience is called to traverse the space, paying attention, this time, to “where to point the feet and not the guns.” The installation, entitled The Cradle of Incivility, creates a surreal and paradoxical effect. Bergonzoni writes about it, “Coffins do not cradle, cradles do not float, in the universe now too ’exterminated’ and seeded to children....”

Only after venturing, with extreme care, down this path (which symbolically represents what man has accomplished or omitted), do we come to Bill Viola’s video The Reflecting Pool (videotape, 1977-1979). The work depicts the death and rebirth of the individual in a natural context, a baptism into a world of virtual images and indirect perceptions. A man comes out of the forest and stands before a body of water; he dives in and, in that instant, time freezes. Time dilates, punctuated only by a series of events seen only as reflections in the water.

The themes of life, death, and rebirth, as well as caring and valuing without anthropological vengeance or cruelty underlie the works of the two artists. Awareness of death helps us understand our precariousness and reflect on how we are “inhabiting” our existence.

Hours: Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2:30 to 6 p.m. Closed Saturday and Sunday.

Free admission

Image: Alessandro Bergonzoni and The Cradle of Incivility (2024). Photo by Fabio Mantegna. Courtesy of Fondazione Mudima.

Milan, at the Mudima Foundation in dialogue the works of Alessandro Bergonzoni and Bill Viola

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