CRAC Alsace
CRAC Alsace presents Smog a Los Angeles, Elisabetta Benassi’s first solo exhibition in a public institution in France. “Smog a Los Angeles” was a jotting on the back of a photograph in one of the archives Elisabetta Benassi is building up: in all some 70,000 photos collected from major press agencies and national dailies like La Stampa and The New York Times. Here the paradigmatic events, locations and personages of the 20th century are thrown together with minor incidents and figures claimed by oblivion, but the documentary material gathered by the artist remains testimony to her problematic, equivocal vision of the events and ideologies it addresses. Firstly because Benassi shows us the backs of her chosen photographs: all the descriptions, captions, credits, stamps and notes that classify and inform the image, rather than the actual image itself, so what we observe and read sets us mentally reconstructing and recreating the missing visual. And because when she puts these documents back into circulation, the different modes of reproduction and presentation she comes up with endow them with a new materiality.Out of these archives objects emerge: installations, sculptures, films, microfilms, drawings. Meticulous watercolour copies, for example, provide an almost archaeological charting of each clue, inscription and rough patch on the paper, giving tangibility to the remains of now invisible plots. In Memorie di un Cieco a microfilm reader, the kind you used to find in libraries, lets you read the verso of the images as it jumps randomly back and forth in time. The artist is endlessly actualizing the past and putting together stories free of all chronology.Smog a Los Angeles is at once paradoxical and exemplary of Benassi’s work. Accompanied solely by a handwritten number and typed on the pristine, so to speak almost amnesic surface of the photographic paper, this laconic legend describes the image of something (smog) that stops you from seeing (Los Angeles). The task, then, is to re-present to oneself what cannot be observed, working from memory or, failing that, via fiction: Smog a Los Angeles summons us to enter history’s blind spots, to recall, interpret and invent. Once inside, our vision of things is activated by various contrivances that home in on, transform and problematise curious archives. A time machine here, birdsong there, a carpet- reproduction of a telegram that once changed an aspect of the world, a modernist cell, a watercolour, a factory canteen table still vibrating from its users, a car: all these things make the history of the 20th century – or rather the memory of it – a dense space, an exhibition through which the spectator moves blindly, stumbling on recollections, rectifying errors of interpretation, conversing with the spectres of Pasolini, Angela Davis, Mario Merz, Einstein, famous animals and illustrious dictators.Elisabetta Benassi was born in 1966 in Rome where she lives and works.
She participated in numerous exhibitions at: Fondazione Merz, Turin (2013) ; Italian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 55th International Art Exhibition (2013) ; Wiener Secession, Wien (2012) ; Venice Biennale 54th International Art Exhibition Illuminazioni, Illuminations, Arsenale, Venice (2011) ; Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2011) ; Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome (2010), among others.Events:27/10 at 11 am Opening brunch21/11 at 7.30 pm Talk by Stefano Chiodi with Elisabetta Benassi26/01/2014 Finissage of the exhibition
Artists:
Elisabetta Benassi
Open:Sunday, 27 October 2013
Close:Sunday, 26 January 2014
Address: Crac Alsace, 18 rue du ch\u00e2teau F-68130 Altkirch
Mail: info@cracalsace.com
Phone: +33 3 89 08 82 59
Web:http://www.cracalsace.com
Opening hour:Tue – Fri, 10am – 6pm | Sat – Sun, 2pm – 7 pm
Closing day:Mon
Photo credits:1. Memorie di un cieco, 2010, Microfilm readers machine, office writing desk Studio B.B.P.R Olivetti Arco (1963),35 mm film, electronic unit, electric wires. 123x140x70 cm, Installation All I Remember, Magazzino, Rome 2010, Collection Alessandra and Paolo Barillari, Roma; 2. Einstein at Coq-sur-Mer, 2012, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Courtesy the artist and Magazzino Rome; 3. The Bullet-Proof Angela Davis,2011, Steel and plexiglass structure, tape recorder, electric wire, watercolour on paper, 240x200x140 cm, Courtesy the artist and Magazzino, Rome.
