User:Magazzino/Elisabetta Benassi



Elisabetta Benassi Elisabetta Benassi (B. Rome, 1966), is an Italian artist currently living and working in Rome.

Reality for me is always a sum total of visible things and other things that remain hidden; it's the "imperfect" layering of times, actions and thoughts; it has a false bottom; it's like entering into the slow stream of thoughts. The film re-winds like time--it's a bachelor machine, it's melancholic.

Life and work
Since the late 1990s Elisabetta Benassi has been creating videos, installations, performances and photographs that oscillate between constructive and visionary impulses, between making things and day-dreaming, between an immediate sense of definitiveness and the flow of emotions and non-linear movements of thought, between clarity of intent and a deeper feeling of indeterminacy. She explores the relations betwen these opposite perspectives by presenting them in her art in tandem, both on the level of content and form. She frequently emplys doubles, twins, couples or alter egos as her subject matter; she constantly juxtaposes and overlaps references to cultural icons of the past century (especially from the 1960s and 19790s) with references to daily life in the present such as biking and hip hop music. Although filled with cinematic memories (at times she calls her videos 'films' because of their narrative nature and their heavy use of cinematic montage and complex soundtracks) her works also recall the way music videos associate imagery with sound in surreal open narratives.

Her interests in Pier Paolo Pasolini emerge from the awareness that his writings, films and personal life, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, were among the first to explore complex hybrid impulses of postmodern subjectivity.

"Elisabetta Benassi is a key figure in the evolution of Italian video art. Benassi's productions express two visions of the world: one vision that is rational and technological while the other is amorphous, dream-like and emotional. The protagonists of Benassi's work tend to be androgynous, anxiously formulaic, doubles or twins; symbolic figures that animate a shocking and visionary reality. They stimulate mechanisms of memory that have either been stifled or lulled into complacency. "Tutti morimmo a stento" (2004) - like a parable - invites viewers to reflect on the consequences and risks of a technological civilization. In a junkyard analogous to a morose arena and an indeterminable time, the protagonists of Benassi's "Tutti morimmo a stento" emerge as hybrid creatures, half man and half machine. Their bodies fused with the machinery of special prosthetics, these "motomen" enact their prophetic tragedy and accompany the artist in an exploration of banal decadence and disengagement."

Exhibitions

 * 2001 – In moto, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano.
 * 2001 – Day’s End, Galleria Antonella Nicola Torino.
 * 2003 – American Academy in Rome (with Joan Jonas), Rome.
 * 2003 – Un arc-en-ciel dans l’air incurvé, Chapelle des Louanges, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
 * 2004 – MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome.
 * 2005 – Sequence 2#, Random Gallery, (Air de Paris e/and Praz- Delavallade), Paris.
 * 2005 – Abandoned in Place, Base, Firenze.
 * 2006 – 3, Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome.
 * 2007 – Site Specific 2. Dopo l’uragano Jorge, Museo Man, Nuoro.
 * 2009 – I Have a Date with Outer Space, Fondazione Merz Torino.
 * 2010 – All I Remember, Magazzino, Rome.

Links to video excerpts online

 * Elisabetta Benassi,Tutti morimmo a stento, 2004