MAXXI’s Collection of Art and Architecture represents the founding element of the museum and defines its identity. Since October 2015, it has been on display with different arrangements of works.
videogallery – free entrance
curated by Julian Rosefeldt
for Fondazione In Between Art Film
The Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt (born in Munich in 1965) is internationally renowned for his visually opulent and meticulously choreographed moving image artworks, mostly presented as complex multi-screen installations. Inspired equally by the histories of film, art and popular culture, Rosefeldt uses familiar cinematic tropes to carry viewers into surreal, theatrical realms, where the inhabitants are absorbed by the rituals of everyday life, employing humour and satire to seduce audiences into familiar worlds made strange. His works are shown internationally at museums and film festivals.
photo © Veronika Bures
Identity and alienation, nostalgia and memory, populism and truth: a poetic but acute diagnosis of the present suggests a pessimistic perspective on the future, in an After Us era.
Life on earth is changing at a breathtaking speed, with ambivalent consequences: expanding access to a globalised market has facilitated the middle class’s growth in former Third World countries and enabled a growing number of human beings to escape poverty. On the other hand, globalisation and turbo-capitalism are accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor, resulting in civil wars and mass migration. Digital technologies and social media offer better access to communication and education to those who were previously isolated and created new phenomena such as hatred and the spread of fake news.
Artists have perceived these disturbing developments for a long time. Sometimes, they look from a present-day perspective, and an imagined distant future at the Anthropocene, or the Capitalocene. The scope and speed of environmental change increase originally from the concept of capital and a concept of growth that excludes most humans and reduces most humans to mere consumers’ role.
The works have been selected from the collection of Beatrice Bulgari’s Fondazione In Between Art Film archive and show a poetic but acute diagnosis of the present, suggesting a melancholic perspective on the future in an era ‘after us’. The artists in this selection of video works focus on the problems and phenomena of our time such as migration, loss and displacement; identity and alienation; nostalgia and memory; control and surveillance; populism, truth and manipulation.
header: Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017.
BIO
Julian Rosefeldt