"SELFIE / Searching for Identity" - Space Ophen Virtual Art Gallery of Salerno, Italy

[Giovanni Bonanno]

International Collective Exhibition dedicated to Selfie and the search for identity

SPACE OPHEN VIRTUAL ART GALLERY

"SELFIE / Searching for Identity"

Edited by Sandro Bongiani

From 28 December 2018 to 28 April 2019

 

Giovanni Bonanno - Italy

On Sunday 28rd December, at 6.00 pm, the international group exhibition will be inaugurated by Sandro Bongiani entitled "SELFIE / Searching for Identity", an exhibition on identity that develops around the theme of selfie and self-portrait. On show 72 works by many international artists who have developed with different expressive techniques a research based on the continuous evolution of the contrasting sensations of contemporaneity highlighting the problematic and true essence of our precarious existence.

 

Coco Gordon, Lyons Co - Usa

Which identity?

We live in an age uniformed with deeply homologated and split beings, characterized by a profound dissociation from reality that heavily affects our restless existence. As Sandro Bongiani writes in the presentation: The loss of the identity of the contemporary man, now accustomed to pre-established ways and imposed by the social system, generates confusion and dissociation in this society full of profound cultural, social and political changes, marked by otherness and new and possible ways in the construction of the ego, dismantling the usual traditional concepts replaced by new and temporary perceptions and the new way of relating; no longer the image of how we are, but how we can "be" replacing the image of ourselves with the reflex and appetizing of the other. All this makes the man appear complicately expressionless and useless. Only the artist, as a good and curious analyst, reveals the man in front of himself, his cultural and social mirror, making us understand how today's technology has definitely upset our lives. With this it does not want to construct the ego as a recording of beauty, but as a possibility to access a deeper level of consciousness in reality, defining a model much more concrete than the conviction of a stereotyped and anonymous model of the present, imposed and conditioned through advertising and the tools of occult persuasion. Being reduced to "one dimension" problematically highlights one's own fragility by sharing the similarity, repetitiveness, similarity of the other and denying the knowledge of an ego that fails and does not wish to define itself and consolidate itself in more stable forms. Of course, these conditioning accepted by ordinary and normal now dismantle the construction of a personal ego by passively accepting the clichés and preferring a false way of "being" in the extreme attempt of appropriation of a pseudo unity to find itself. In feeling lost and helpless we are all forced to scrutinize ourselves in the mirror of our "impersonal self" in search of any anonymous and sterilized identity, but perfectly adhering to the precariousness of our existence and of how we have become.

 

Artists present: Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Picasso Gaglione, Luc Fierens, Reid Wood, Noriko Shimizu, John M. Bennett, Rosalie Gancie, Mailarta, Snappy, Maria Alejandra Besozzi, Matthew Rose, Miguel Jimenez, Coco Gordon, Cracker Jack Kid, Mustafa Cevat Atalay, C. Mehrl Bennett, Fernando Aguiar, Monsenhor enVide neFelibata, Anja Mattila, Marina Salmaso, Remy Penard, Pedro Bericat, Michel Della Vedova, Maria Josè Silva - Mizè, Clemente Padin, Maya Lopez Muro, Jacob de Chirico, Ruggero Maggi, Emilio Morandi, Ernesto Terlizzi, Mauro Molinari, Pier Roberto Bassi, Rolando Zucchini, Gino Gini, Carlo Iacomucci, Fernanda Fedi, Claudio Grandinetti, Luisa Bergamini, Giovanni Fontana, Enzo Patti, Giancarlo Pucci, Vittore Baroni, Elisa Zadi, Marcello Diotallevi, Alfonso Caccavale, Alessandra Angelini, Antonio Sassu, Calogero Barba, Anna Boschi, Giovanni Bonanno, Lamberto Caravita, Bruno Cassaglia, Maria Credidio, Renata and Giovanni Stadada, Maria Grazia Martina, Cinzia Farina, Domenico S Everino, Daniele Virgilio, Gian Paolo Roffi, Antonella Sassanelli, Gianni Romizi, Pierpaolo Limongelli, The Santini del Prete, Lancillotto Bellini, Domenico Ferrara Foria, Bruno Pierozzi, Claudio Romeo, Fulgor G. Silvi, Roberto Scala, Francesco Cornello, Fiorentina Giannotta, Roberta Savolini.

 

   

Presentation of Sandro Bongiani

"SELFIE / Searching for Identity"

International Collective Exhibition dedicated to Selfie and the search for identity

 

 Which identity?

Never before has man been faced with a situation of "total s-nourishment" as in our day. The technological civilization has upset the normal relationship between man and nature, shattered the usual concept of space / time and consolidated the sense of loss. The rapidity and acceleration of our existence has negatively affected all modern civilization. The isolation of our time from that of nature, the continuous and nomadic movement of our movements has become an essentially "artificial" element no longer tied to normal rhythms. The space-time dimension of the earth and of the universe has contracted to such an extent that it gives way to the speed of television transmission in real time in an essentially "immaterial" and inactive dimension. A capitalist society that has lost the usual points of reference and created the constriction and the great emptiness of contemporary man; now nothing is measurable, there are no longer even stable models. We live in a very precarious situation where the movements, real-time communications, television, the distorted use of social networks like Facebook, Instagram, the paranoid and manic photographic selfie, along with other contingent factors have changed and deleted the identity of each of us. We often change the identity of what is second, of the context in which we find ourselves using the same gestures and the same language, perhaps out of fear of being marginalized; we are afraid of appearing "different" from others and therefore we look at the other "in an attempt to be the same person. In this comparison there is the urgency to redesign the boundaries of the ego, the ego and the other are continually involved and conditioned in a transcurrent and indeterminate process of definition and remodulation. Otherness means comparison between the self and the other and suggests similarity, difference and way of stabilizing an identity. Furthermore, it is also the ability to change, to cross certain boundaries and become "other". With the otherness new borders are created, but also new limits. With assimilation and simulation we tend to eliminate distinction and diversity in a process by which the otherness of the other (or ours) is called to conform. In some ways, contemporary man perpetuates the concepts of assimilation, resemblance and diversity. However, "to be" means not to conform to anyone; do not wish to achieve similarity in anything. The loss of the identity of the contemporary man by now accustomed to pre-established ways and imposed by the social system generates confusion and dissociation in this society full of profound cultural, social and political changes, marked by otherness and by new and possible ways in the construction of I, dismantling the usual traditional concepts replaced by new and temporary perceptions and the new way of relating; no longer the image of how we are, but how we can "be" replacing the image of ourselves with the reflex and appetizing of the other. All this makes the man appear complicatedly expressionless and useless. Only the artist, as a good and curious analyst, exposes man in front of himself, to his cultural and social mirror, making us understand how today's technology has definitely upset our lives. With this it does not want to construct the ego as a recording of beauty, but as a possibility to access a deeper level of consciousness in reality, defining a model much more concrete than the conviction of a stereotyped and anonymous model of the present, imposed and conditioned through advertising and the tools of occult persuasion. We live in an age uniformed with deeply homologated and split beings, characterized by a profound dissociation from the reality that heavily affects our life. Man can try to overcome his limitations and his certainties, but he must not lose consciousness of himself, of his "personal self" and the difference "of the other". Being reduced to one dimension in a problematic way highlights one's own fragility by sharing the similarity, repetitiveness, the similarity of the other and denying the knowledge of an ego that fails and does not wish to define itself and consolidate itself in more stable forms.  Of course, these conditioning accepted by ordinary and normal now dismantle the construction of a personal ego by passively accepting the clichés and preferring a false way of being in the extreme attempt of appropriation of a pseudo unity to find itself. It is no coincidence, if we deliberately used, for the first time in one of our virtual shows, a sought-after frame of great workmanship and beauty, this would make us reflect on the precarious condition of the individual who supremely demands the appearance of the other, in this case is the frame, the priority role of managing and giving body to its visibility. An entirely lacerated individuality that can not find its logical dimension. In feeling lost and helpless we are all forced to scrutinize ourselves in the mirror of our "impersonal self" in search of any anonymous and sterilized identity, but perfectly adhering to the precariousness of our existence and of how we have become.   Sandro  Bongiani

 

"SELFIE / Searching for Identity"

SPACE OPHEN VIRTUAL ART GALLERY

Inauguration: Friday 28 December 2018, 18.00

 

Via S. Calenda, 105 / D - Salerno, Tel / Fax [phone]

e-mail: [e-mail]

Web Gallery: http://www.collezionebongianiartmuseum.it

Hours continued every day from 00.00 to 24.00