Konstfack students interact with iconic architect Gio Ponti at the Italian Cultural Institute

CuratorLab student Vasco Forconi curates exhibition with art students Lisa Grip and Danae Valenza

Welcome to Shoegaze at the Italian Institute of Culture

Opening Friday 29 March 6–9 pm

During 2019, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, student at CuratorLab Vasco Forconi will curate a series of exhibitions entitled Shoegaze. The project, divided in four chapters, will show Sweden and Italy-based artists interact with the building designed by iconic architect Gio Ponti.

The large furnished window designed by Gio Ponti as the only visual threshold between the inside and the outside of the building becomes the stage and the visual device that artists are invited to activate with the production of new works, reflecting on the notions of public appearance and intimacy, voice and shyness, performativity and frailty. In the first chapter of Shoegaze Lisa Grip and Danae Valenza occupy the space surrounding the window with two separate works, respectively a visual and a sound landscape, which originate from an extended conversation between them. Both artists share an interest in opening up their practice to a collaboration with groups of people close to them, often dealing with ideas of friction, care and intimacy.

Shoegaze is a subtle tribute to the homonymous musical subculture which emerged in the UK in the late 1980s. The derogatory term coined by the press soon came to represent a short-lived yet influential movement that was able to resist the regime of spectacularity and entertainment dictated by the music market. The desire to be on the public stage with a shy yet often confrontational attitude, the determination to preserve their artistic research, and the affective nature of their collective experience make shoegazing a potential reference for a younger generation of visual artists struggling with self-representation, precarious identity and individualized socio-political attitudes.

With her installation Lisa Grip reverses the function of Gio Ponti's window and the viewer’s gaze through it. A large metal skeleton mirroring its design is installed inside the building, becoming the support structure for large-scale photographic prints reproducing an almost abstract natural landscape. The use of analog photographic paper, only partially fixed, allows the prints to keep developing throughout the exhibition. In the foreground, stuck to the surface of the glass, the artist places the negative of two embracing figures lying on the ground. An enigmatic and reversed landscape scene opens up in front of the viewer, subtly overturning and blurring the distinctions between inside and outside, intimate and public.

In the open space in front of the furnished window, Danae Valenza plays a sound piece that has been produced by arranging various elements of pre-existing songs and musical tracks. The result is a soundscape, almost like the score of an invisible movie, that aims to activate the political potential contained within the act of listening. The sound fragments are collected from a diverse range of sources (from ethnographic archives to old pop songs) representing the broad spectrum of musical experience. They are then patiently processed and mixed in a non-hierarchical compositional structure.

The exhibition is open from the 1^st to the 30^th  of April, Monday to Thursday 14–17, Fridays 10–13

Welcome to Konstfack, c/o Italian Cultural Institute, Gärdesgatan 14, Stockholm