'Provenances', Umberto di Marino, Naples, Italy, 14 May–14 September 2009. Opening: 14 May, 20h.

Starting at 20.30h lecture-performance 'Museum of Incest. A Guided Tour' by Simon Fujiwara

'Provenances' is composed of three specially-commissioned solo presentations by Erick Beltrán (1974 Mexico City. Lives in Barcelona), Jordi Mitjà (1970 Figueres. Lives in Lladó, Girona) and Simon Fujiwara (1982, London. Lives in London/Berlin).

The exhibition purposely coincides with the 2009 Maggio dei Monumenti (May of Monuments), a month-long festival during which many historical palaces and private sites throughout Naples are made accessible to the public. The exhibition will reflect on the heritage industry and the museumification of history, as well as the creation, transmission and fidelity of cultural worth. The artists share an aesthetic and pragmatic concern with the principle of the personal archive or the pre-museal wunderkammer – the categorization and veracity of objects, images and words is always provisional.

Erick Beltrán presents four works each focussed around a relic-like artifact made of a particular natural substance. Following the related ‘Serie Calculum’ (Calculum Series) (2008) – "an essay about the concentration, the density and the creation of value" as he has described – each object is accompanied by a text-diagram, and together they elicit a dense proliferation of references, narratives, contexts and interconnections.

In Floating Lines (2009) Jordi Mitjà reflects on practices of information retrieval, falsification and accumulation. In his seemingly-sparse installation, clusters of photocollages are hidden from immediate view by a string curtain which protects them from light while necessitating the visitor’s gesture in order to reveal them.

Encompassing formats including performance-lectures, published fiction and collections of articles and artefacts, the projects of Simon Fujiwara take shape as a carefully constructed borderline of ethology, eroticism, architecture and ancestry. The Museum of Incest (2009) is a multipart project which unearths an implicit myth of human origins and an explicit sexual archeology. + info...

Download the press release (English or Italian) from here.

UMBERTO DI MARINO, Via Alabardieri 1, Piazza dei Martiri, 80121 Napoli, ITALY. Map here.
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 15-20h (August closed)

With the kind support of: