At the Italian Cultural Centre on Tuesday October 17th at 7pm Dr. Vittorio Urbani Director of Italian non for profit organization Nuova Icona in conversation with grunt gallery Director Glenn Alteen will discuss the work of two artists present in Venice this Summer: Flavio Favelli with an independently funded installation, and Giorgio Andreotta Calò, part of the Italian Pavilion in the current 57th Venice Biennale. (The Italian Pavilion exhibition Il Mondo Magico was curated by Cecilia Alemanni and features work by three artists Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey).
“The brainchild of pavilion curator Cecilia Alemanni, the title is a direct reference to the book of the same name by Ernesto de Martino, published by Einaudi in 1948. And just as his Il mondo magico proposes a return to the imaginary and the fantastic as a means for experiencing the richness and multiplicity of the world, the artists chosen by the curator—Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, and Adelita Husni-Bey—pursue their adventures in the sphere of magic and imagination, each producing profoundly distinct creative results, in terms of both content and form.” From the website of the 57th Venice Biennale
Urbani will use the two exhibition and his own experience of curator and manager in the Biennials of Venice and Istanbul, to talk about the value of larger exhibitions in relationship to smaller international collaborations within the context of globalism and the local. The focus would be on “strategies for survival” among artists: the Biennials and what is left out of it …
Vittorio Urbani, an independent curator and manager of contemporary art projects based in Venice, Italy, has been organizing contemporary exhibitions and curating art books and catalogues since 1993 as director of the non-profit organization Nuova Icona – associazione culturale per le arti.
Nuova Icona is dedicated to the realization of projects by contemporary visual artists. With an experimental attitude in contemporary art, Nuova Icona views itself as the organizing element, the active layer between the public and the artist, a workshop where new projects can be realized. Under Urbani’s artistic direction, Nuova Icona has held about 200 shows in Italy and abroad and published more than 100 catalogues. Since 1995 Nuova Icona has organized for 5 editions the national official participations of Ireland in the Venice Art Biennale. It has also collaborated as manager to the national official participations of Wales (2001, 2003, 2007, 2009), Turkey (2001, 2003 and 2005), Scotland (2003), USA (2003), India (collateral exhibition in 2005), Finland (2005), Bulgaria (2008), Azerbaijan (2007, 2009, 2011), Lebanon (2007), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, 2009), Palestine (2009), Iraq (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017). The association has a special interest in artistic projects concerning cultural exchanges with Turkey and the Middle East.
Presented with the generous support of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia and the Italian Cultural Centre.
