After its debut at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan in November 2021 and its presentation at Seosomun Shrine History Museum in Seoul in November 2022, the Flu水o project is opening on September 1, 2023 at McaM - Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai with an exhibition that showcases in a never-before-seen installation version the performances created by the artists in previous editions.
Caonceived by Luciana Galliano and curated by Davide Quadrio, director of the MAO Museum of Asian Art in Turin, Flu水o is a project by Alessandro Sciarroni with Andrea Anastasio, involving the artists Chiara Bersani, Rossella Biscotti with Attila Faravelli, Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo, Anna Raimondo and Silvia Gribaudi.
The central theme of Flu水o is water, an element indispensable to life, a substance of immense poetic power, but also a place of death and the heart of social, political and anthropological instances of stringent topicality. This dualitỳ of values is reflected in the very structure of Flu水o, which sees the co-presence of reenactments and reinterpretations of some water-related performances by East Asian artists of the 1960s alongside a representation of Mauricio Kagel's sarcastic chamber opera Mare Nostrum on the tragedies of colonialism.
"Flu水o is the perfect remedy against a Eurocentric and sclerotized view of the world. It is a project that emphasizes the need to ritualize the world in order to understand and resolve it, a place of reflection for a sick universe in need of cure," says Davide Quadrio, who continues, "It is incredible how art expressed through collective and inspired work contains within itself the perfect terms for a construction of meaning. Art as a vehicle for collective resolution through the human in its essence of being cultural and thus simply human. The artist as a human being in his reconciling essence."
At the Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai, the exhibition opens with the live performance The present in now by Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo.The visitor will then encounter Ho Tzu Nyen's double-screen video installation Fluxo, which reinterprets the original Flu水o event at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, and the works from Andrea Anastasio's Eden series, 2021. Anna Raimondi's four sound sculptures Moa, Amina, Mariana and Adlen from the series The Shapes of Dreams Return to the Sea, 2021, accompany the visitor along the path, which concludes with video installations of live performances from previous presentations of the project, particularly Sea State by Chiara Bersani, Water Body by Silvia Gribaudi and The Present in Now by Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo.
Flu水o is organized by Arthub, Ming Yuan Group, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, MAO Museo d'Arte Orientale, and Fondazione Torino Musei with the support of Consulate General of Italy in Shanghai, Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai, Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity within the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2020).
