Viaggio in Sicilia. Maps and Myths of the Mediterranean

From July 1st to September 10th 2017, the Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonino Salinas of Palermo presents, Viaggio in Sicilia. Maps and Myths of the Mediterranean, Planeta’s project for Art and the Territory, curated by Valentina Bruschi, with new works by six artists: Marianna Christofides, Gabriella Ciancimino, Malak Helmy, Andrew Mania, Pietro Ruffo, Luca Trevisani.

 

The seventh edition of Viaggio in Sicilia, comprises this exhibition as a result of the impressions absorbed during the artist’s nomadic residency, which took place in September 2016 during grape harvest, and the artists’ reference to the Salinas Museum collection. Amongst the most important archaeological exhibition sites in Europe, the museum opens to contemporary art for the first time, enhancing its constant opening to different media which are increasingly orientated to the present, ​​in order to look at the art of the past with new eyes.

 

Six artists of the same generation, three Italians and three from other countries, traveled through Sicily seeing different places, people and stories in one of the Italian regions richest in myths and legends. Landscapes and symbols sparked their imaginations and the resulting works have been specifically designed for the museum spaces, from sculpture to drawing, from photography to video, always in dialogue with the collection of the Salinas Museum. A path of contemporary artworks will be aligned, parallel to the museum’s new collection display, around the two sixteenth-century cloisters and includes the ex-cells of the northern corridor of the Greater Cloister of the former Olivella Monumental Complex.

 

As the Director of the Museum, Francesca Spatafora states: “The project is the result of a collaboration between a public institution and a private company that has always been interested in the promotion of art and culture, which aims to stimulate visitors to the Museum to look at ancient works of art through the point of view of contemporary artists. This is a way to reduce the erroneous perception of a gap between the art of the past and that of the present and to foster in the visitors the idea of dialogue between artworks of different ages and types”.