The Opening Gallery presents the New York premiere of
Orit Ben Shitrit
:
ECHOES IN MY MOUTH
+
WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES
(EMPAC commission)
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 20, 6-8pm
Exhibition: July 19 - July 29, 2023 (Tue- Sat)
The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker Street, Tribeca, NY
Curated by Maureen Sullivan
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Special Event: Wednesday, July 26, 6:30-7:30pm
“Becoming leaf: queering technologies toward human photosynthesis” talk by Vanina Saracino. Followed by a conversation with Orit Ben Shitrit.
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Short version:
Orit Ben Shitrit: ECHOES IN MY MOUTH +WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES
ECHOES IN MY MOUTH and WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES are moving image speculations about the fragmented Mind. ECHOES depicts humans who struggle to find purpose and motivation in a future society where memories have been rewritten, and conflicts resolved. WARD lays out a cyborg's upheaval. Their broken and fractured mind is ultimately celebrated through imagination, color, music and dance.
Orit Ben Shitrit: ECHOES IN MY MOUTH +WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 20, 6-8pm The Opening Gallery, 42 Walker Street, Tribeca, NY
These works are moving image speculations involving the fragmented Mind. In ECHOES IN MY MOUTH, individuals struggle to find meaning and motivation in a futuristic society where machines have achieved consciousness. Within this world, human memories and traumas have been rewritten and erased, leading to the supposed healing of our current fractured humanity and its conflicts. Bodies in robot-like movement roam from the natural world to a cave, seeking a dose of archived memories. This work references both seed banks and memorial archives, as well as Plato’s Allegory, questioning reality and our ability to create other entities, and the realm of artificial intelligence, beyond our self-referential cognition.
WARD OF THE FERAL HORSES is set in a 19thc. horse stable. It depicts the upheaval of a cyborg who struggles with suppressing his primal urges to conform to societal expectations. Distraught and failing to communicate his pre-Oedipal being, his mind cracks and unleashes an emancipatory carnivalesque dance troupe— Jinns—who emerge from his room’s furnishings.
The recent MEMORY DAYDREAMS, black and white acrylic paintings, are a rumination and an extension of the images from ECHOES IN MY MOUTH. Depicting trans-species combines of humans, plants, animals and machines, they are futuristic in essence, imagined beyond the limits of our human-centric perspective.
The Opening Gallery is pleased to present the Group Exhibition Spectral Senses featuring a selection of works by Stella Ampatzi, Daniel Firman, Nefeli Masia and Eleni Paridi addressing issues of the hauntology and ontology of the senses curated by Dr. Sozita Goudouna.
The group exhibition explores the ways that the impact of new technologies is rearranging the established hierarchy of the senses.
The project draws from the ways our highly mediated world, and technology becomes an important model for the artistic process, while the participating artists explore the implications of the techno-human interface by investigating embodied technology and the technologized body. The auditory, the olfactory and the tactile are similar to the visual crucial sites of embodied knowledge. However, the modernist segmentation of the senses is now giving way to dramatic multi-sensory mixes or transpositions.
The techno-human interface is manifested in Daniel Firman’s installation “2nd hug” whereas a human figure makes an entrance into a door (opening) that consists of an assemblage of worn out objects. The artist reflects upon the logic of assemblage as he is making a statement related to life as to art.
For the artist, offering a second chance as well as a second reading seems a necessary empathetic gesture towards the activation of our senses. Without exception, Firman’s pieces were produced with objects gleaned from the streets of NYC. The sculptures are the reflection of a second acceptance, they seem to be made of intertwining, of fusion, with objects sometimes reduced to their simplest materiality. The pieces have already been exhibited once, thus achieving a second attention, a second look, a second life in a kind of up-cycling.
Biological metaphors often appear in discourses about up-cycling and about the relations of human nature to art. Nefeli Massia’s installation of sculptures intertwines the aesthetic with the biomedical by incorporating real immature cells that are able to make other blood cells that mature and function as needed, namely, stem cells that are used in procedures, such as bone marrow transplants. “Spectral Senses” see biological phenomena and aesthetic practices in a shifting and reciprocal relationship to each other.
Stella Ampatzi’s autonomic networks refer to self-managing or self-organizing networks that can operate and adapt without direct human intervention. In the context of warfare, the use of drones in conjunction with autonomic networks has gained attention and interest in recent years. Autonomic networks can enhance the capabilities of drones by allowing them to communicate, coordinate, and make decisions collectively, leading to improved efficiency and adaptability in warfare scenarios.
By juxtaposing DYSAUTONOMIC vs Autonomic NETWORKS, the artist’s intention is to draw attention to the stark contrast between the funding allocated for dysautonomic diseases and the funding dedicated to the development of autonomic networks in warfare. The purpose is to emphasize the disparity and raise awareness about the discrepancies in financial support between these two areas.
Eleni Paridi is exploring notions of the sensuous as a transcedental form while her new pieces investigate the concept of synasthesia. “Murmures” were originally accompanied by Konstantia Gourzi’s sound composition thus the visual artist has conceived of these works in an expanded context where all the senses converge.
Presently, we notice the ever-closer relationship between the sensuous and the technological. The resulting set of experiences can be called a sensorium, namely, the subject’s way of coordinating all of the body’s perpetual and proprioceptive signals, as well as the changing sensory envelope of the self.
Multiple sensory structures, as well as other modes of perception, the sum of their relations and the ratio of mixture and importance comprise a sensorium. The exhibition pays attention to the otherwise imperceptible hauntings of our senses and of the sensorium.
Intermedia and sensorial artistic practices address the influence of technology on the senses and are often involved in a mediated form of communication (where the viewer is imposed by the work of art), produced, or transmitted not through a direct sensory contact, but by means of an electronic system for the processing of information. The effect of media on our senses (namely the sensorium) is a creation of the physical, biological, social, and cultural environments of the individual organism and its relationships, while being in the world. According to Stanley Cavell, medium (media) is not a given, it is not an a priori; Cavell focused on the communicative and therefore temporal contingency of the word medium, as he wrote, ‘I characterized the task of the modern artist as one of creating not a new instance of his art but a new medium in it.’ In the selected art pieces the sensorial intersects with the intermedial in the ways they construct sentient and experiential aspects of artistic creation and audience reception to challenge our perception of the ontology and hauntology of the artistic medium and of the senses.
Visual Artists Bios
Stella Ampatzi: https://www.stellaampatzi.com
Daniel Firman: http://danielfirman.com
Nefeli Masia: https://nefelimassia.com
Eleni Paridi: https://www.eleniparidi.com
EVENT: July 12th at 6–9PM
Bleedings, Confessions and Other Sacred Stories
Gabriele Tinti & Andres Serrano
Inneschi By Luciano Chessa
The Opening Gallery, Contra Mundum Press, and Eris Press are pleased to announce the event “Bleedings, Confessions and Other Sacred Stories”, an evening with poet Gabriele Tinti presenting his ekphrastic poetry series and books Bleedings (New York: Contra Mundum Press) and Confessions (London: Eris Press), in cooperation with Andres Serrano. The event takes place in conjunction with the live performance “Inneschi” by Luciano Chessa and the group exhibition “Spectral Senses” with participating artists Stella Ampazi, Daniel Firman, Nefeli Masia and Eleni Paridi curated by Sozita Goudouna on Wednesday July 12th at 42 Walker Street, with the participation of Andres Serrano, the actor Vincent Piazza, the publisher Rainer J. Hanshe, and the translator Nicholas Benson.
Tinti will introduce the screening of selected videos of readings by Abel Ferrara, Vincent Piazza, and Andres Serrano of his poems. Serrano and the author will then sign copies of the books.
Bleedings — Incipit Tragoedia is a series of poems Tinti composed in the spring of 2020. The epigraphic collections of the National Roman Museum, the Capitoline Museums, and the National Archæological Museum of Naples, as well as the most recent funerary inscriptions, were a spur for this work that aims to transfigure our fear of death, pain, and suffering. A writing that starts from ruins, crosses cemeteries, and smells wounds, the traces of what has disappeared. It is born of a memory of the ancient and a contempt for the contemporary. Artist cover by Andres Serrano.
Confessions is a highly distinctive artistic collaboration between Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano. They have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness.
Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date. Tinti’s verses accompany a series of images composed by Serrano — one of the most highly regarded artists of our time. Serrano’s works engage provocatively with the visual legacy of the Christian and classical traditions, while also embodying a very particular kind of beauty. Both the poems and the images in this volume are a major achievement in their own right; together they make for an essential collection.
The films of Tinti’s poetry are the video documentation of a reading series inspired by ancient and modern myths, which has involved some of the best-known artists of our time, such as Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell, Stephen Fry, Franco Nero, and major world museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the British Museum, the Capitoline Museums, the Ara Pacis Museum, the Colosseum and the National Roman Museum, amongst others.
A Performance / Audiovisual Installation exploiting hearing aids’ micro-feedback, medical devices, brass bells, drums, and a megaphone. Commissioned by MUSICA SANAE and presented by La Digestion. Maschio Angioino Castle, Naples, May 3–4 and in Sokolowsko, Poland, on August 16, 2019.
A composer interested in hearing: now that’s not new: all composers in some ways or others, we surely hope, are interested in hearing. Much less seems to be the composers interested in the loss of hearing, unless it’s their own.
* * *
Reading about deafness, I eventually run into the work of British deaf scholar, author and activist Paddy Ladd, and I thus discovered “deafhood”, a term he coined in 1993 to describe a “positive” acceptance to the condition of deafness and hearing disabilities.
In his 2003 book Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, he writes: “Deafhood is not seen as a finite state but as a process by which deaf individuals come to actualize their deaf identity, positing that those individuals construct that identity around several differently ordered set of priorities and principles, which are affected by various factors such as nations, era and class being equally important”. As mentioned above, the usual response of deaf or partially deaf people to their condition is to isolate themselves, becoming depressed and paranoid. In stark contrasts with this reaction, Ladd’s positive affirmation made me wish his book was translated into Italian so that my dad could read it.
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Short biographies:
Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Roman Museum, the Capitoline Museums, the Archeological Museum in Naples, the Ara Pacis Museums, the Colosseum and the Glyptothek of Munich. His recent publications are Last Words (Milan: Skira Rizzoli, 2016), The Earth Will Come To Laugh and To Feast (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2020), Ruins (London: Eris Press; Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 2021) and Bleedings (Milan: La Nave di Teseo, 2022; New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2023).
Andres Serrano is an American artist and photographer. Renowned for his ambitious and challenging installations, he has won acclaim for series of photographs including America (“the photographs give such vivid presence to their subjects that it is hard not to feel genuinely moved” — The New York Times) and Torture (“both a call for justice and a compassionate portrayal of the human plight” — The Guardian). The images featured in Confessions have grown out of Serrano’s profound engagement with the work of Michelangelo.
Vincent Piazza is an American film, television and stage actor best known for his roles in the television series Boardwalk Empire, the 2007 film Rocket Science, and as Tommy DeVito in the film adaptation of Jersey Boys.
Abel Ferrara is an American filmmaker, known for the provocative and controversial content in his movies. A long-time independent filmmaker, some of his best-known movies include Ms. 45 (1981), King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992), and The Funeral (1996).
Nicholas Benson, the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, holds a PhD in Italian from NYU and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. He is the translator of Attilio Bertolucci’s Winter Journey (Viaggio d’inverno, 1971; Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, 2005) and Aldo Palazzeschi’s The Arsonist(L’incendiario, 1910; Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2013).
Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist, music historian. Chessa’s compositions include A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy; Piombo, a piece for 2bows cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti, and the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe. In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by the New York Times as one of the best events of the year.
Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and the editor of Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth’s Fragments (2014). He is also the author of the hybrid book Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with Italian artist Federico Gori, and Beyond Sense (forthcoming 2024), a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud. His translations include Charles Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), as well as longer and shorter works by other authors. Work of his has appeared in Caesura, Sinn und Form, ChrisMarker.org, Asymptote, Black Sun Lit’s Vestiges, and elsewhere. His translations of Évelyne Grossman’s The Creativity of the Crisis and Léon-Paul Fargue’s High Solitude are due out later this year, as is his own book, Closing Melodies, a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche and Van Gogh. Hanshe’s new work in progress is called Dionysos Speed.
The Opening Gallery was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrepresented artists, performances and live events, and the work of women artists and artists of color. Proceeds support neurodiversity, charitable causes, and the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enriching the lives of autistic adults.
The Opening Gallery and ERIS ART are pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Andres Serrano. Opening Saturday, April 22 at 42 Walker Street, this will be the artist’s first significant foray into painting. The exhibition celebrates the release of Confessions: a highly distinctive artistic collaboration between Serrano and the acclaimed poet Gabriele Tinti.
Serrano is one of the world’s most renowned artists. His new works mark a departure from the medium with which he is most closely associated, while also exemplifying the imagination and critical intelligence that he has always brought to bear upon it. They originated as oil pastel drawings that Serrano made over black and white photographs of sculptures by Michelangelo, in a process that he likens to automatic writing: “The resulting images are different from the pictures that inspired them,” he writes, “but I hope the spirit of Michelangelo is there.”
Serrano’s Confessions images amount to a formidable engagement not only with an artistic predecessor, but also, like so much of his work, with Christian iconography. Embodying a very particular kind of beauty, they lend a new emotional force to ostensibly familiar artistic depictions of religious narratives.
Serrano’s collaboration with Gabriele Tinti has led to a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti, author of the Montale Prize-winning collection Ruins, has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date.
A deluxe, signed, numbered special edition will be available for sale at the exhibition, and the launch event will feature a reading of selected poems from Confessions by the actor Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire, Jersey Boys).
Andres Serrano is an American artist. Renowned for his ambitious and challenging installations, he has won acclaim for series of photographs including America (“the photographs give such vivid presence to their sub- jects that it is hard not to feel genuinely moved”—The New York Times) and Torture (“both a call for justice and a compassionate portrayal of the human plight”— The Guardian).
Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell, Robert Davi, Marton Csokas, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Fry, James Cosmo, Michael Imperioli, Franco Nero, Burt Young, Michele Placido, Alessandro Haber, Jamie McShane and Joe Mantegna. In 2018 his ekphras- tic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Mon- tale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.
The Opening Gallery was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrep- resented artists, and the work of women artists and artists of color. 50% of the proceeds support neurodiversity and charitable causes, and 25% of the proceeds are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enrich- ing the lives of autistic adults.
ERIS ART is the art branch of independent publisher ERIS PRESS, based in London and New York. The press publish- es art, literature, and nonfiction, with a particular emphasis on politics and philosophy. Recent and forthcoming titles include Maurice Saatchi’s memoir Do Not Resuscitate: The Life and Afterlife of Maurice Saatchi, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s short story collection Book of Water, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s No Politics but Class Politics, Kenneth Goldsmith’s I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, and Thomas Schlesser’s biography of the artist Anna-Eva Bergman, Luminous Lives.
