BID PROJECT GALLERY
Opening May 28, 2015
h. 18.30
via Fara 12
Milan 20124, ITALY

T: +39 335 69 35 869
Tues.—Sat. 15—19
or by appointment
info@bidprojectgallery.com

La città che sale / The City Rises
Zoe Beloff
Katarina Burin
Ali Cherri
Dor Guez
Ahmet Ögüt
Valerio Rocco Orlando
Amie Siegel
Curated by Chelsea Haines

In 1910 Umberto Boccioni painted his first futurist composition, The City Rises (La città che sale). A monumental work six and a half feet tall by almost ten feet wide, the painting captures the frenzied pattern of Milan’s urban landscape in the early twentieth century, depicting the construction of an electrical plant as a blur of red, blue, and yellow workers alongside theirn horses. This Janus-faced scene of modern architecture made through pre-modern means is characteristic of Milan itself, the site where Italy’s most influential avant-garde movement was born, described by F.T. Marinetti as simultaneously “tradizionale e futurista.” Despite the century of distance that has repeatedly and even cataclysmically revealed modernism’s flaws and failures, the uncritical celebration of technology and urban development promoted by the futurists by and large continues with today’s frenetic, accelerationist, global society.
The artists in the exhibition “The City Rises”—hailing from Europe, North America, and the Middle East—revisit the fraught history of the previous century, not to reproduce the past uncritically, but to unearth its possible impact today. They explore the possible futures of the past, showing work that looks to modernity’s archetypal containers—architecture, the city, and outer space—to reveal and critique multiple histories of war, politics, migration and displacement, spirituality, and the tension between individual memory and collective identity.Continue Reading..