A guide to miart 2022 and the events not to be missed during the Milano Art Week

From 29 March to 12 June, the first solo exhibition in Italy by one of the most radical and important figures on the Polish art scene – Artur Żmijewski – opens at PAC. He has exhibited in institutions all over the world, including documenta 12 and 14, the Venice Biennale and in 2012 he curated the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Curated by Diego Sileo, the exhibition is part of an exhibition programme that for some time now has aimed to open up to the international scene, focusing on great artists who have not received the attention they deserve in Italy and on the museum as a research pole for social, political and identity issues. Żmijewski’s research is founded on a concern for contemporary socio-political problems. Through his works he examines the mechanisms of power and oppression in the community, as well as the inclinations of fear and evil in the human instinct. The relationship between the internalisation of extreme emotions and their manifestation through physical expressions is the common thread running through the works on display, a varied selection of historical and recent works, three of which were conceived specifically for the PAC. Żmijewski confronts the observer with a system representing different forms of fear: fear of solitude, of being forgotten, of mental disorders and disability, but also of a foreign and hostile environment, of state racism. There are several references to refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border during the summer-autumn 2021. No further words are needed to understand the urgency of reflecting on these issues. Now more than ever.

Finding out what happens to human bodies with the rise of the metaverse will probably take some time yet, but Elmgreen & Dragset seem to want to speed things up. From 31 March, Fondazione Prada’s Largo Isarco site opens to the Scandinavian duo for a total of 3,000 m², including the courtyard, which until now has not hosted any major exhibitions. The title of the project “Useless Bodies?” is programmatic, a perennial question contemporary society has no answer to. Is the physical presence of the human being truly indispensable today? What will be the consequences of the post-industrial era’s race towards digitalisation and automation? Complex questions to answer today, which lead artists to reflect on the idea of the “ideal body” over time. 

The exhibition opens with “Serial Classic”, Fondazione Prada’s first exhibition dedicated to the ambivalent relationship in classical sculpture between originality and imitation (a theme also addressed, albeit from different angles, in the exhibition “Role Play”, on display until 27 June at the Observatory Prada Foundation). Classical and neoclassical bodies are associated with hyper-realistic representations by the protagonists of the solo exhibition. Beyond the Podium, the mood becomes darker. In a game full of dark humour, the two artists play on the senses and counter-senses of Western lifestyles: rows of abandoned workplaces and spas, futuristic bunker-like dwellings, alienated ordinary objects and dog robots. Disorienting images that stage a systemic collapse and question everyday surveillance mechanisms. After the Short Cut installation in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in 2003, Elmgreen & Dragset hit the mark again.

It is worth mentioning the opening of Steve McQueen’s solo exhibition – winner of a Turner Prize and an Oscar – for its fame, on show from 31 March to 31 July 2022. Curated by artistic director Vicente Todolí, the exhibition is produced in collaboration with London’s Tate Modern, where in 2020, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, an initial version of this project was presented at the Steve McQueen exhibition. In Milan, the visual artist, director and producer has conceived a special exhibition project entitled “Sunshine State”, featuring a new selection of works. Through the spaces of the Naves and the Cube, and on the outside of the building, the evolution of his twenty-year career in the visual arts can be experienced in a non-chronological path, which six installations and one sculpture are displayed in.

The construction of identity and the sense of belonging, as well as the right to freedom and post-colonialism, are fundamental themes in his research, based on the film medium. In his works, this language takes on a sculptural body in spatial and temporal terms, an aspect that takes on a particular thickness when the human body is filmed, in a constant agency for the viewer. Therefore, the exhibition features an unpublished video that gives its name to the entire exhibition. A work commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2022 that the artist has been working on for more than twenty years; as the curators explain, “Sunshine State” proposes a reflection on the beginnings of Hollywood cinema and on how the big screen has had a major influence on the perception and construction of identity. 

If the Venice Art Biennial’s upcoming trend is to exhibit surreal and dreamlike worlds, Yuli Yamagata’s poetics are moving in the same direction. For the first time in Italy, the Brazilian artist, born in 1989, presents some of her new works at Ordet, the space directed by Edoardo Bonaspetti and Emanuele Cernuschi in the Porta Romana area. Since its opening year, 2019, Ordet has stood out for displaying experimental and avant-garde international research (as the last beautiful exhibition by Jon Rafman). Drawing inspiration from mass culture, Yamagata’s works stage human mutations, poised between reality as we understand it today and the animal world. 

From 2 April to 28 May, an octopus, a snail, a hermit crab and a snake will populate Ordet, in an installation interpreted as a twisted, altered and sprawling skeleton. In Yamagata’s padded and fabric-covered works, a little grotesque and a little cartoonish, what is known becomes perturbing. At first glance the subjects are identifiable, and immediately alienating. Just as aesthetic taste is malleable, ranging from horror taste, shopping mall consumerism and science fiction comics, so does human intelligence?

MASSIMO is an intimate venue, almost as if it were a person. Based in Porta Venezia, via degli Scipioni, this non-profit space for contemporary art was founded in December 2019 by Stefano Galeotti, Giulia Parolin and Martina Rota. They aimed at creating a space that could capture the most recent artistic experimentation, focusing on the human relationships built over time with the artists in order to sincerely embrace all the aspects surrounding an individual’s poetic research. During miart they inaugurate the exhibition “+39 334 2928559” by Dafne, a group consisting of a little bit human and a little bit metaphorical different identity, founded in 2019 by Filippo De Marchi, William Merante and Giovanni Riggio, who are dedicated to artistic research ranging from music and sound to performance and visual arts, constantly trying to redefine and expand the boundaries of these categories.

Until 19 April, MASSIMO’s space changes its appearance with Dafne’s contribution. The straight lines delimiting the ceiling and floor lose themselves in minimal volumes, perceived by the viewer in an almost two-dimensional way. The white cube is transformed into an achromatic multiverse, a convulsive, curved green screen housing four sculptures and a painting. They are works created simultaneously by the three founders, in an actual sharing of the creative process. Tables with centripetal force, brushstrokes with futuristic overtones, bowling balls on scales and abstract numbers meet in a swirling environment capable of translating chaos into harmony. For less fascinated readers, we refer to the title of the exhibition, which is a mobile phone number too.