Silence Where Things Abandon Themselves

The exhibition offers a unique perspective over Italian contemporary art and performative scene, while creating a dialogue with Zagreb and its artistic scene, in order to lay the foundations for a more intensive intellectual exchange and future cooperation. 

The exhibition Silences where things abandon themselves displays the works of eleven Italian artists who seem to have deliberately turned away from all decontextualising and “strong” reconceptualising of the “thing” within the artistic dimension.

These artists, on the contrary, seem to have chosen a quite different strategy: they work with given “things” without entirely or partly keeping them away from their respective temporal order.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Lemon Trees (1925), by the Italian Nobel Winner prize poet Eugenio Montale. In Montale’s verse, one may uncover an ideal response to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conclusive admonition contained in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: the act of “being silent” is not here to be interpreted as “avoiding to speak”, but rather as an active choice of “being silent about something”. Thus the verse, in a way, determined the choice of the artists for the exhibition.

These artists, with their work, create a peculiar dimension of “silence” in which “things abandon themselves” and betray “their final secret” (Montale), a silence that protects the things from common thinking and, in a way, from art itself.
Two new projects were especially conceived for this exhibition.

Artists Christian Frosi and Diego Perrone achieved, together with the students of the Zagreb School of Applied Arts and Design, a video performance that will be shown on the Media facade of the Museum.

On the exhibition’s closing, Giorgio Andreotta Calòwill stage a special concert inside the construction site of the new Academy of Music building (ex-Željpoh-Ferimport building) in Marshall Tito Square, in collaboration with composer and conductor Mladen Tarbuk, and the students from the Academy. Through the medium of sound, the performance will draw attention to the specificity of both architectural and urban history of this area of the town.

The exhibition is realised in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture in Zagreb.
Under the Patronage of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Italian Embassy in Zagreb.
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, the City Office for Education, Culture and Sports in Zagreb, Veneto Region, Directorate of Cultural Activities and Entertainment