Furini Arte Contemporanea ha il piacere di annunciare Arte: Affari, Lavoro o Perditempo – il progetto dell'artista croato Nemanja Cvijanović in collaborazione con gli artisti internazionali Deimantas Narkevičius, Cesare Pietroiusti, Société Réaliste, ABS Grupa, Fokus Grupa, Vlado Martek che, attraverso il prisma del lavoro, riflette sul ruolo dell’artista e sulla funzione dell'arte nella società contemporanea, colpita dalla crisi del capitalismo neo-liberale. Considerando i luoghi dell’arte come posto di lavoro, ne deriva un complesso disegno che connota la posizione dell'arte nei confronti della società, della politica, del mercato e quindi la sua sfera d’azione.
L'insostenibilità dell’attuale sistema economico-politico-culturale, che tra l’altro mette in discussione anche l'autonomia dell'arte elitaria, costringe gli artisti a pratiche che diventano interventiste e criticamente sovversive in relazione alla società. Per renderle più efficaci, è necessario stabilire nuove funzioni biopolitiche di società e cultura. Purtroppo, parallelamente, emerge l’atteggiamento inverso rispetto all'arte e quindi come viene percepita e riconosciuta: favorita, ostruita o banalizzata.
Il progetto Arte: Affari, Lavoro o Perditempo rappresenta infine il paradosso che trova l’arte politica attiva offertasi al mercato del lavoro.




“Arte: Affari, Lavoro o Perditempo”


Bio (in brief)

Nemanja Cvijanović (1972, Rijeka - Croatia). He lives and works in Rijeka. He uses almost all the media and techniques of visual and performing arts. His work is based on conceptual/post-conceptual/ setting and is developed through the practice of collective performance, the performance of interactive installations and facilities, video production and multimedia projects, painting, photography, and sound works. His focus of interest is questioning and uncovering the mechanisms of production, manipulation and consumption of meaning in post-modern culture that is based on a critical attitude towards the ideological and aesthetic values of modernist culture and society. His criticism is manifested in the works of art based on the structural and semantic order of pre-existing works, historical events or phenomena, by means of mimesis and / or simulation as well as the use of visual meta-language. Cvijanović lucidly links past and present, parallel realities of different social systems and different artistic strategies.

Deimantas Narkevicus (1964, Utena - Lithuania). Lives and works in Vilnius, Narkevicius started using film during the early nineties. His films exercise the intricate practice of memory and portray a contemporary society confronted with the painful processes of history. The camera offered him the possibility of exploring different narratives, allowing him to play with the course of time. In film he found a perfect medium for exploring both sound and visual language. The disjunctions between words and images in Narkevicius’s films make manifest the impossibility of an objective documentary. He eschews the close-ups that are a common feature of contemporary documentaries, used to demonstrate the veracity of an interviewee’s testimony. The central characters of Narkevicius’s narratives are often absent from the screen, replaced by objects, drawings and other surrogates.

Cesare Pietroiusti (1955, Rome - Italy). He lives in Rome and New York. His work is principally concerned with questioning ideas of art’s perceived worth, the logics of economy and consumption, as well as problematic and paradoxical situations that are hidden in common relationships and in ordinary acts. Pietroiusti works mostly in film, video, and performance. Pietroiusti’s practice often starts with assigning himself or others a task, or asking others to give him instructions. For a project at the Louisiana Museum, the artist spent seven days closed in a gallery space and lived each day with the food and the things selected by another person.

Société Réaliste is a Parisian cooperative created in 2004 by Ferenc Gróf (1972, Pécs) and Jean-Baptiste Naudy (1982, Paris). Central to their activities is the exploration, subversion and deconstruction of the specific devices of visual communication that have been developed and employed by institutions, governments and rulers, i.e.,the representatives of power – in the fields of religion, politics, culture, art and finance – so as to position themselves. By exploring the representative and aesthetic roles of these agencies – including signs, logos, maps, symbols, typefaces, landmarks, emblems, statues or even buildings – in complex contexts of much broader time and space, the artists place them in a new light in the form of a “political cabinet of curiosities”, a critical, narrative implementation of design.

ABS Grupa was formed as a critical platform active in the material practice and political contradictions of contemporary Croatian painting, art and possibilities of transitional culture and society. The group consists of Alan Alebić (1976), Ivica Blažić (1975) and Ivan Skvrce (1980). They graduated in 2003 from Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Art, Department of Painting. Currently they study at the final year of their MA program at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Ljubljana. They live and work between Zagreb, Rijeka and Krk. They won the annual award of the Croatian Association of Artists for Best Young Artist in 2008.

Fokus Grupa is an art collective based in Zagreb. Iva Kovac and Elvis Krstulović work together from 2005 and from 2012 under the name “fokus grupa”. their work is situated within the framework of post-concep- tual art practices and their format is interdisciplinary; realized trough exhibitions, interventions in public space, publications, writings, lectures and discussions. fokus grupa works with and against the idea of the ‘political’ as well as ‘subjective’ in art and culture production. understanding art production as materialist practice Kovac and Krstulovć have investigated legal, economical and social (lack of) consequences of art production as well as ways in which politics (mis)appropriates and instrumentalizes emotions.

Vlado Martek was born in Zagreb, and graduated from the University of Zagreb with a degree in literature and philosophy. By vocation Martek is a multimedia conceptual artist, poet and writer, and his oeuvre includes actions, agitations, ambiances, murals, graffiti, texts on his own art and on other artists, prints, art postcards, sculptures, poetic objects, paintings, art books and staged photography. Martek’s work can primarily be seen as avant-garde poetry. In this, he follows the tradition of other authors working in experimental poetry in the 20th century, standing opposed to the dominant lyrical paradigm of European literature.