Summer Rhapsody

5.07 – 10.09.18

With GRAND OPENING (SUMMER RHAPSODY) KURA. opens in Milan on 5 July and launches the exhibition program directed by CURA. in the historic premises of Fonderia Artistica Battaglia.

KURA. is born from a misspelling of our magazine’s name. The pronunciation is the same, but the K represents the glitch, the element of novelty that bases its roots in the very idea of “spazio okkupato” (occupied space), that is also associated with the k in kunsthalle, without necessarily being one. It is the physical space and extension of CURA. which joins the programming of exhibitions already curated by Andrea Baccin and Ilaria Marotta, founding directors of the magazine, held in the premises of BASEMENT ROMA.

Movement, the alternation of empty and full, but also role improvisations aim at creating the rhythm of the exhibition experience of this new space. An experience that, although protracted in its assumptions, will be called to define itself over time.

“We are not interested in getting to a point, but in identifying a path. Investigate the cracks more than the finite form, the process more than the final destination.”

According to David Reinfurt, the eclectic co-founder (together with Stuart Bailey) of Dexter Sinister and creator of the visual identity of the project, the “scheme for a future program” is summarized “in that small alteration, involving a few strokes, between a C and a K” which defines the open nature of the logo, still far from a finished form.

With KURA. in Milan, the CURA. team, together with a board of artists and curators which include the aforementioned David Reinfurt, Lorenzo Benedetti (Kunstmuseum St. Gallen), Luís Silva and João Mourão (Kunsthalle Lissabon), Samuel Leuenberger (SALTS Birsfelden), Anthony Huberman (CCA Wattis Institute), aims at alternating solo and group exhibitions of artists mostly belonging to the generation born in the early ’80s, who came to the fore on the international scene and had a leading role in a new layout of the contemporary scene.

“The relationship with the foundry and its premises will be significant but not decisive in defining the works or use of the materials. It will be a fluid collaboration, involving roles and spaces, in which everyone will be able to draw the best from the experience and skills of the other.”

Swaying between reality and fiction, between social ritual and mise en scène, GRAND OPENING (SUMMER RHAPSODY) embodies, and at the same time activates, the celebrations of the opening of the place, serving as a prelude to something new, a free and varied orchestration of actions, bodies, shapes and sounds, which take on the popular traits of a great street party.

Works by Mitchell Anderson, Davide Balula, Anna-Sophie Berger, Louis Fratino, Nancy Lupo, Mélanie Matranga, Caroline Mesquita, Adrien Missika, Martin Soto Climent and a site-specific intervention by Roberto Coda Zabetta, will implement the celebrating context of the exhibition.

“The party is a gnoseological model that implies the collectivity and self-affirmation in the celebrating experience,” according to Walter Benjamin. (1)

Hence, the party and its potential annual recurrence define the forming of a new collective body articulated over time and in the materialization of a ritual and changeable experience, which has always represented the moment of disruption of the imposed social order. The artists’ work, which for the occasion will be placed in many of the Fonderia’s areas, eradicates roles, functions and uses, in an allegorical meta-narration.

“The party is a hortus conclusus, a space/time, a place for the soul, a magical environment, where one participates in a collective preparation work.”(2) 

GRAND OPENING (SUMMER RHAPSODY) thus defines a collective and choral entity, a multifaceted big bang in which individuality and community come together, “an interlude of universal confusion” in which everything is destroyed and from which at the same time everything is born: a moment of disruption, of waiting and beginning, which starts the next KURA. exhibition program in Milan.

1 W. Benjamin W., Theses on the Philosophy of History (also On the Concept of History, from German: Über den Begriff der Geschichte), 1940.

2 L. Tussi, La festa popolare: un’interpretazione pedagogica [The Popular Feast: A Pedagogical Interpretation], in “Il Calendario del Popolo”, n. 637, December 1999.