From April 14 to 16, Fieramilanocity will host Crescendo – the 27th edition of miart; Milan’s modern and contemporary art fair organized by Fiera Milano. Its Artistic Director – Nicola Ricciardi – described it to Domus with three simple words: “trajectory, restitution and internationality.” The three terms embody the key principles of this year’s fair. First of all, the awareness of being in the middle of a rebuilding phase, with a construction metaphor that well represents the desire to “build the first, second, and third floors” – once the solid foundations have been achieved with the previous editions. Secondly, the desire to open up to the city and its citizens in a concrete and tangible way. “Hence the creation of a programme of talks that is free and usable by all, or a widening of commissions so that even city institutions can have a positive and objective spin-off from the fair,” the director tells Domus, referring to this year’s novelties. We mention in particular the new collaborations with Triennale Milano and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, but the Massimo Giorgetti award as well, in its first edition.
Guide to miart and Milano Art Week 2023
Titled ‘Crescendo’, the new edition of the modern and contemporary art fair is expanding throughout the city with a series of parallel proposals and events. Here the ones not to be missed.
BASE, Ground Hall
Via Bergognone 34
Claire Fontaine, Patriarchy Kills Love, 2020
BASE, Ground Hall
Via Bergognone 34
Claire Fontaine, Patriarchy Kills Love, 2020
PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
via Palestro 14
BORA FEAT. PRIMITIVE ART performance
Friday, April 14, 2023
8:30 p.m.
Yuri Ancarani, The Challenge, 2016. Still video. Courtesy Studio Ancarani
PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
via Palestro 14
BORA FEAT. PRIMITIVE ART performance
Friday, April 14, 2023
8:30 p.m.
Yuri Ancarani, The Challenge, 2016. Still video. Courtesy Studio Ancarani
GAM - Galleria d’Arte Moderna
Via Palestro 16
Candice Lin,Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, Installation view, Walker Art Center,Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2021
Curated by Federico Giani April 14 - June 18, 2023
GAM - Galleria d’Arte Moderna
Via Palestro 16
Installation view, Candice Lin, La Charada China, The Taipei Biennial, 2018.Courtesy of the Artist, and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Chen Yung-Jen. © CandiceLin
Careof - Fabbrica del Vapore
Via Procaccini 4
Cristian Chironi, Poster, 2006, 27'
Careof - Fabbrica del Vapore
Via Procaccini 4
Luigi Viola, Do You Remember This Movie, 1979, 4'22''
Milanese subway network and airports
Sottotraccia, MAC – Milan Art Community
Milanese subway network and airports
Frame dell’opera Hello Who?, 2022, di Simon Fujiwara, selezionato dalla galleria Gió Marconi
Noah 'Rilla' Kretschmann and Gündalein during Sorry Mom by Simona Andrioletti and Riccardo Rudi, AdbK, Munich. Ph. Credits Ferdinand Putz
Eataly Art House at Orefici11
Via Orefici 11
10 p.m. to midnight
link to access
Noah 'Rilla' Kretschmann and Gündalein during Sorry Mom by Simona Andrioletti and Riccardo Rudi, AdbK, Munich. Ph. Credits Ferdinand Putz
Via Cambiasi 10
April 11-18 (opening: 7-10:30 p.m.)
Rebecca Digne, Kinopeinture, video still. Cortesy Seven Gravity Collection
View Article details
- Irene Sofia Comi
- 12 April 2023
Therefore, for the first time, the contents of the fair come out like roots from their own vase to graft themselves into other places in the city. Starting with Triennale Milano that will host miart LIVE at Triennale Milano – a series of meetings with big names such as Jonathan Monk and Angharad Williams, Gianni Pettena and Italo Rota, Beatrice Trussardi and Massimiliano Gioni. Particularly significant is the synergy with the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, which chooses to celebrate its first 20 years as a nomadic museum right inside the fair pavilions, with a cake by Maurizio Cattelan. And then there is the collaboration with radio stations, with The Sound of miart. In musical language, Crescendo (Italian for ‘increasing’) indicates the gradual increase in the intensity of sound. Regarding the fair, it indicates above all the gradual growth in participation. A growth that goes hand in hand with Milan’s increasing prominence in the arts.
“Over the past five years, Milan has emerged as a key contributor to the European contemporary art scene,” Ricciardi tells Domus. Because of the investments around Expo 2015, the opening of Fondazione Prada and the arrival at the helm of miart of Vincenzo de Bellis, who transformed the fair from a local event to an international one. This resulted in many foreign collectors settling in the city – a trend further intensified following Brexit. The same rooting of collectors in Milan led foreign galleries to see the city as fertile ground to expand and grow in again. “I had worked for four years in Turin, as director of the OGR, collaborating with Artissima and many institutions in the city, achieving some good results. But they cannot compare to what we have built in the last 3 years in Milan,” Ricciardi concludes.
Not surprisingly, Art Week stretches into 2023 beyond continuity with Design Week. This year, many museums and foundations have taken the run-up, opening the week before the fair. Worthy to mention among many: Ann Veronica Janssens’ elegant solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Fondazione Prada with Anatomical Waxes and Fondazione ICA Milano with Nathlie Provosty. Then there are also initiatives dedicated to public art. Especially thanks to the inauguration of three new works by Rossella Biscotti, Liliana Moro, and Otobong Nkanga for ArtLine, as well as Falena – Nico Vascellari’s monumental installation designed for the exterior of the Triennale Milano building – and Franco Mazzucchelli’s works, also in the Darsena. This year miart grows by expanding its collaborations, with a fashion brand. In addition to established partnerships such as the main partner Intesa Sanpaolo and Maison Ruinart, which will propose a special project in the VIP lounge, furnished with Kartell and Saba – the fashion brand MSGM partners with the fair, commissioning the duo Eva & Franco Mattes with a site-specific work for miart’s inauguration.
Opening image: Yuri Ancarani, Il Capo, 2010. Still video. Courtesy Studio Ancarani
From April 11, BASE will host Cancel patriarchy – Claire Fontaine’s site-specific light installation. All visitors will be able to assert that patriarchy kills (love) and that we are all clitoridian women, in a tribute to Carla Lonzi’s feminist writings. The two texts send a strong and clear message, in line with ‘Pensati Libera’ (Italian for ‘Think of yourself as free’), another work by Claire Fontaine at the center of recent Sanremo Music Festival rumors. Indeed, the visual poetics of the two LED-lit texts – Patriarchy kills (love) and We are all clitoridian women – motivates passersby. They interact with the bodies that cross the environment, proposing a reflection on patriarchal oppression as a systemic force.
April 11 - September 1, 2023
BASE, Ground Hall
Via Bergognone 34
Patriarchy is us – the artist states – and it is up to each and every one to get rid of it starting from their own feelings and unsatisfied need for love and life. As Lonzi would say, do we want to be unexpected subjects? It is up to us to determine that. We have until next September 1. Moreover, the intervention stands in an ideal dialogue with the wall painting I trenta by artist Flavio Favelli – a project promoted by MUDEC that opens for miart in the courtyard between the museum and BASE.
April 11 - September 1, 2023
BASE, Ground Hall
Via Bergognone 34
Until next June 14, the PAC - Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (Italian for ‘Contemporary Art Pavilion’) is hosting the first major monographic exhibition dedicated to Yuri Ancarani. His works are born from an original and accurate mixture of documentary cinema and video art. Curated by Diego Sileo and Iolanda Ratti and realized in partnership with MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Forget your dreams traces the entire career of the great artist and video maker, showing for the first time Yuri Ancarani’s films brought together in a single venue. In addition, a new work dedicated to violence against women, made in Milan in a courtyard of the University of Milan, will be presented.
Until June 14
PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
via Palestro 14
BORA FEAT. PRIMITIVE ART performance
Friday, April 14, 2023
8:30 p.m.
“No one believes in fantastic stories anymore; now you laugh when you watch a horror film. What’s scary instead is just reality,” the artist says, who prefers describing scenes from reality to creating dreamlike and surreal representations, in a more emotional and radical approach and fruition. On the occasion of Art Week, a new live version of the work Bora conceived by the artist in 2011 will be presented on April 14. A video that serves as a visual for a live concert, in a mutually reinforcing interaction between visual arts and music.
Until June 14
PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
via Palestro 14
BORA FEAT. PRIMITIVE ART performance
Friday, April 14, 2023
8:30 p.m.
The installation Personal Protective Demon by Candice Lin opens to the public on April 14. She will participate in the 2023 Venice Biennale and winner of the 6th edition of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize. For this work, a marble monolith, an idol-totem with an apotropaic flavor, characterized by multiple monstrous faces and genitals. The artist works through a process of critical fabulation; research and working methodology Candice Lin uses to organize her works. In fact, her works are always rooted in a thorough investigation of the real history of people and artifacts, traditional materials and artistic techniques, and above all of the misunderstandings and distortions that have always characterized the intercultural relations between West and East.
April 14 - June 18, 2023
GAM - Galleria d’Arte Moderna
Via Palestro 16
Moreover, the sculpture is wrapped in silk with a decorative motif conceived by Lin, combining elements typical of Eastern silk production from descriptions by Western observers, who then speculate on the nature and meaning of what they see, potentially misrepresenting it. Curated by Federico Giani – curator of the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro – the initiative marks a collaboration between two important city entities that, in a dialogue between public and private, narrate and host especially works from the first half of the 20th century.
Curated by Federico Giani
April 14 - June 18, 2023
GAM - Galleria d’Arte Moderna
Via Palestro 16
A center for research and production of the moving image since 1987, Careof presents the exhibition Tungsteno, curated by Marta Cereda and with an immersive installation by Hypereden – a collective that will also attend Alcova during the Salone del Mobile. With a selection of works by twenty-six artists within its archive, from Franco Vaccari to Marinella Senatore, from Rossella Biscotti to Micol Roubini, from Adrian Paci to Moira Ricci, the exhibition covers a time span from the 1970s to the present.
April 12 - May 19, 2023
Careof - Fabbrica del Vapore
Via Procaccini 4
Through found footage, vintage images, home movies, and the creation of fiction, the project investigates the theme of memory as living matter, referring in particular to the phenomenon of cryptomnesia: a false memory that is perceived as an original creation. April 12 until May 19, 2023.
April 12 - May 19, 2023
Careof - Fabbrica del Vapore
Via Procaccini 4
Contemporary art lands in Milan as well, in subway stations and airports, following in an ephemeral and temporary key the ‘Naples model’. From April 10 to 16, twenty-one video works – selected by some of the most interesting contemporary art galleries and city foundations members of MAC – Milano Art Community – will transform Milanese subway network into a large exhibition space. The project – coordinated by Mr. Lawrence studio and curated by MAC – will be broadcast via the UpTv television channel.
April 10-16, 2023
Milanese subway network and airports
Among the information content and advertisements, spot projections of works signed by some of the world’s leading video artists will be on display. Such as Eva Marisaldi, Beatrice Marchi, Simon Fujiwara, Tobias Zielony, Anna Franceschini, and Riccardo Benassi. The project recalls Land Art – the first exhibition broadcast on German national TV from an idea of Gerry Schum, in 1969.
April 10-16, 2023
Milanese subway network and airports
“I wonder what mothers you had”, Pasolini wrote. If you wonder what this phrase has to do with a fashion store, do not miss Sorry Mom. The audience will be immersed in deep blue light in a spectacularly multimedia event. A video to watch on a maxi screen, a fashion show, a soundscape, and a live performance involving rappers, Noah ‘Rilla’ Kretschmann, Güendalein, Over Lapa, Akuma, and Gretä. Already presented in Munich, the project by artists Simona Andrioletti and Riccardo Rudi is the result of a collaboration between Eataly Art House - E.ART.H. and Orefici11. On April 13, it will be presented again in the Orefici11 store in Milan for that evening only (reservations are required).
With an evocative title, the project was born in partnership with E.ART.H of Verona and is the evolution of a workshop that involved a group of twenty young people to think about their existential condition and who will wear garments provided by the brands The North Face, Timberland, Napapijri and Dickies, made ad hoc with quotes and phrases derived from the workshop. Not to be missed.
April 13, 2023
Eataly Art House at Orefici11
Via Orefici 11
10 p.m. to midnight
link to access
Until April 18, a curious mixture is hosted at Campo Teatrale theater. Sottopalco is an independent exhibition organized by artists active in the Milanese scene: Iva Lulashi, Ludovica Anversa, Matteo Pizzolante, Michela De Mattei, Francesca Flora, Guildor, Nicola Lorini, Silvia Capuzzo, Rebecca Moccia and The Cool Couple. The theater space thus becomes an exhibition space, which later will turn into an action space on the opening day, telling part of the Milanese art scene. On April 11, in fact, the exhibition will welcome visitors with a program of screenings and performances curated by the artists along with Seven Gravity Collection, a collective that for years has focused on the acquisition and promotion of video art works. Films by Rebecca Digne, Helen Anna Flanagan, Ali Kazma, Paul Maheke, Basir Mahmood, and Lily Reynaud Deward will be shown for the occasion.
Campo Teatrale theater
Via Cambiasi 10
April 11-18 (opening: 7-10:30 p.m.)