Premio MAXXI 2016

The Premio MAXXI celebrates its 15th anniversary, with site-specific installations by 2016 finalists: Riccardo Arena, Ludovica Carbotta, Adelita Husni-Bey and Zapruder.

Now in its eighth edition, the Premio MAXXI – the project for the promotion and support of young Italian art, the founding nucleus of the museum’s collection – is celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2016. 15 years in which it has seen new generations of artists grow and become established, including Mario Airò, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Stefano Arienti, Massimo Bartolini, Vanessa Beecroft, Rossella Biscotti, Lara Favaretto, Marinella Senatore, Nico Vascellari, Vedovamazzei, Francesco Vezzoli and many others.

Premio MAXXI 2016 — **Top**: ZAPRUDER filmakersgroup, *Zeus Machine*, 2016. Photo Cecilia Fiorenza, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI. **Above**: Ludovica Carbotta, *Monowe (the city museum)*, 2016. Photo Cecilia Fiorenza, courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI

Until 29 January 2017, Riccardo Arena, Ludovica Carbotta, Adelita Husni-Bey and ZAPRUDER filmmakergroup, the Premio MAXXI finalists, will be presenting their site specific installations. On this occasion the exhibition of the finalists’ work will be enriched by a documentary section devoted to the eight previous editions and featuring archive materials, photographs and videos of the 35 artists who have taken part from 2001 to the present day.

The exhibition curated by Giulia Ferracci opens with Zeus Machine by the ZAPRUDER filmmakersgroup. An elevated, gilded parallelepiped stands mysteriously in the museum space. Only after the initial impact does the visitor realise that it is possible to access the interior of the structure, within which a video inspired by the 12 labours of Hercules is projected. A work investigating myth, mystery and discovery.

The exhibition continues with La Luna in Folle by Adelita Husni-Bey. The artist presents a set composed of three scenes in which three groups of actors stage televisual mini-series while a camera rotates around the structure filming performers and spectators. The series will then be screen on three monitors that take the place of the actors on the stage.

The second terrace of Gallery 3 features the work by Ludovica Carbotta who for some time has been investigating the space inhabited by man. At MAXXI the artist is presenting a new chapter in the project Monowe (the city museum), shown for the first time in Bologna in 2016. Here Carbotta overlays the architecture with that of the pre-existing Caserma Montello with structures in wood evoking those that at one time occupied the same spaces. The architecture recreated in Monowe (Museum) becomes a museum within the museum, conceived by the artist to be inhabited by a single individual. The work recounts the solitude of the hyper-connected man of today on the one hand while on the other it is an invitation to start over from the individual as a measure of all things.

The exhibition concludes with Orient 1 – Everlasting sea by Riccardo Arena, A composite and complex work, dense with references, that recounts that unknown that has always and will always represent the element of greatest attraction for man. The images from which this work is born are rooted in the research undertaken by the artist in recent years in Russia: the Cosmism, a philosophical movement born in Moscow in the early-twentieth century, a sculpture reproducing the one dedicated to the Russian cosmonauts, a picture on the wall evoking Malevich’s Suprematist Square; diverse images composing an atlas of prompts and the musical notes of Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky.

until 29 January 2017
Premio MAXXI 2016
MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo

Premio MAXXI 2016

The Premio MAXXI celebrates its 15th anniversary, with site-specific installations by 2016 finalists: Riccardo Arena, Ludovica Carbotta, Adelita Husni-Bey and Zapruder.

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