The new exhibition "F(l)ight Sketches - for Bert Theis" will be open to the public from 30 March to 5 May 2019 at Cercle Cité Luxembourg.
Cercle Cité has organised "F(l)ight Sketches – for Bert Theis" as part of the series of events titled "Arcipelago Bert Theis", initiated by the Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. The exhibition will bring together twelve artists, some of whom frequented the Isola Art Center in Milan, the platform for experimentation and debate where Bert Theis was one of the charismatic figures. Others were friends of Theis or artists whose conceptual or political stance has much in common with his.
Irene Coppola, Edna Gee and Edith Poirier, Renk Ozer Sara and the members of the Serio Collective were students on the courses taught by Bert Theis at NABA (Nuova Accademia Belle Arti). With Barbara Barberis and Paola di Bello, they have all been active at the Isola Art Center in one way or another, embracing the idea of fight-specific actions. Two of the multiple goals of fight-specific actions are to imagine alternatives to the dominant capitalist ethic and to make visible the efforts of people who conceive tangible utopias, such as the self-managed factory RiMaflow on the outskirts of Milan.
Jeff Weber and the Common Wealth collective are past winners of the Bert Theis Grant that rewards innovative methods. Centring on the visual artist Claudia Passeri, Common Wealth revisits the Italian village of Furio near Urbino, with the goal of bringing the magic back to a community where social ties have disintegrated during the age of consumerism, while Jeff Weber explores the conceptual world of photography on a personal and experimental journey suffused with poetics. Meanwhile, photographers and videomakers, but also playwrights, Karolina Markiewicz and Pascal Piron take an interest in social movements and individual experiences that derive from tensions in today’s world and which often take on a metaphoric dimension in their works.
For his project Memoria Episodika, Edmond Oliveira draws on the personal histories of Portuguese immigrants to Luxembourg, of whom he is a descendant, revealing the difficulties individuals were made to suffer but which are often smoothed over in the official records. Moreover, the series of slides titled “The Disappearance of Mont Ventoux” by Simone Decker, which was created in a mountainous area and without photomontage, is an example of art’s ability to give another image of the world and to transform it through the power of imagination: using a touch of humour, it brings together the exhibition title’s references to both flight and fight.
The opening of the exhibition will take place on Saturday 30 March 2019 at 11:30 in the presence of the artists and curators. The exhibition will then run everyday from 11:00-17:00 until 5 May 2019. Free guided tours are offered every Saturday at 15:00 with English visits planned for 6 and 27 April 2019.
Admission to the exhibition is free.
