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until 07.07. | #3931ARTatBerlin | Luisa Catucci Gallery presents from 3. June 2023 (Opening: 02.06.) the exhibition HYPERCONNECTIONS of the artist Alessandro Zannier.
Alessandro Zannier, an Italian artist with an international career who has already participated twice in the Venice Biennale (Architecture 2021, Art 2022), is now taking Berlin by storm by participating in the Latitudes of Art Biennale curated by Virginia Monteverde, which opens exactly the day after his solo exhibition HYPERCONNECTIONS at the Luisa Catucci Gallery in Kunsthaus Bethanien. A double exhibition for the Italian artist, not by chance! Zannier’s double Berlin action concretises three different artistic realities into one effective connection: Luisa Catucci Gallery, Virginia Monteverde and Zannier’s main gallery ARTandide in Verona. Three places that share a similar vision of art and affirm their role as instigators for fundamental reflections on the implementation of a better future.
Zannier is an atypical conceptual artist who oscillates with equal intensity between visual art and electronic auteur music – here under the pseudonym Ottodix. In recent years, his artistic practice has revolved around precise concepts inspired by physics, astronomy, the Anthropocene, Earth history and environmental issues. This artistic demarche makes him one of the protagonists of what is called “Ethical Art”, i.e. art that is considered both a valid tool for opening up the paradoxes and contradictions of contemporary society and a key to open-mindedness, making it one of the decisive factors for emancipation and balanced, ecological and solidarity-based social change.
The exhibition HYPERCONNECTIONS at Luisa Catucci Gallery opens with a cycle of Zannier’s visual works, created by translating Big Data from the environment into sound and 3D animation, from his “Hyperobject” series. The subjects are pictorial portraits of individual frames of these digital animations, intended to immortalise humans in this unprecedented guise of a “swarm of phenomena” on a vast space-time scale that is only now becoming visible thanks to technology.
Some of these canvases are preliminary studies based on the neural connections of the brain and serve to give a definitive look to the 3D animations of Big Data and to illustrate the concept of the “hyper-global connection”, that network of human connections, migration routes, air and sea routes, energy pipelines, internet, satellites, economic networks, etc., that today envelops us in a single gigantic organism or “hyper-object” in which everything that happens spreads instantaneously from the local to the global.
Still Life, 10 Hyperobject 2021, Alessandro Zannier ©Luisa Catucci Gallery
Zannier’s canvases – with their interesting mix of cyberpunk and neoliberalism – confront us with important ecological problems such as the state of the oceans, where sound waves generated by ships are acoustic pollution that is extremely harmful to flora and fauna, not to mention the damage caused by plastic waste, which has led to new monstrous realities such as the Pacific rubbish vortex.
Works that reveal an unprecedented aspect of the “hyper-man”: He is a kind of hyper-object, a hyper-tool, at once a champion and a creature of the multiplicity of contemporary events, choices and historical contexts, unhinging the concept of the individual “I” and highlighting instead the unconscious collective dynamic of what Zannier defines as a human swarm colony on earth.
The paintings are accompanied by two video works: “Toxic Aurora” and “Hidra”.
“Toxic Aurora”, which will be exhibited for the first time at the Italy Biennale Sweden in 2022 at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, shows an aurora created with pollution data from Genoa provided by the CNR (Italian Research Institute).
“Hidra”, in turn, is created by merging a range of environmental data on the oceans, water acidification, microplastics and temperature rise obtained by marine robots from various research institutes in the Azores, Spitsbergen and other parts of the Atlantic.
ENT Project 6 Continents:
Zannier collects Big Data thanks to his ENT installations, two radiating/receiving light structures that put Italy in dialogue with the different continents, matching Big Data on different types of pollution – such as data on the oceans – and on human phenomena with a serious impact on the environment – such as migration, deforestation and overproduction of food.
Zannier has already installed four of these systems on as many continents: South America, Oceania, Africa and Asia. The “ENT5 Berlin/Verona”, a tower for exchanging environmental data between Berlin and Verona, will represent Europe. The numerical data collected – also thanks to the collaboration with the Italian CNR and international research institutes – create a 3D animation with sound effects representing the impressive “human swarm”, similar in appearance to many biological forms found in nature at other scales. The coincidence is not random, but follows the micro-macro theory that proclaims the interconnectedness of the whole.
ENT5 Berlin/Verona, a “data bridge” and now also an ideological “bridge”, will first be installed at Bethanien for the Biennale curated by Monteverde before joining the other works in Zannier’s solo exhibition at Galerie Luisa Catucci.
Alessandro Zannier, Portrait, ©Luisa Catucci Gallery
Alessandro Zannier was born in Treviso in 1971, where he lives and works.
He is a conceptual artist who works with music and visual art, between physics, environment and Big Data, with works and concerts, with multimedia and popular orientation. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and has participated in international solo and group exhibitions, including the Correr Archaeological Museum in Venice, be three editions of the Italia Cina Biennale, between Beijing and Turin, at the Curitiba Biennale (Brazil) and at two consecutive Venice Biennales. Under the musical pseudonym “Ottodix”, he has released 8 concept albums, a collection and a biography and is considered a “cult” project of Italian electronic wave music. In 2016/17 he presented in Beijing and Berlin the concept album “Micromega” about the orders of magnitude of matter, the cosmos and the visionary website www.micromegaproject.com, which is considered a real web installation, a mixture of illustrated “hyperalbum” and encyclopaedia of matter, which became a well-known and discussed case in the Chinese intellectual community as well as an important series of the NFT in 2022. In 2020, he released “Entanglement”, an album about the correlation of phenomena on a global scale, and in 2021/22, the related, ever-expanding project “ENT”, which consists of a series of twin light installations around the world. Invited to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale – Italian Pavilion, the CNR ISMAR in Venice, the 2022 Venice Art Biennale – Cameroon Pavilion and the University of Auckland, the project continues to collaborate with research institutes, universities and museums and will continue until 2023 when it will have completed its 6 continental twins. Also in 2022, he realised his solo exhibition “MareMoto 4.0” at the Galata Museo del Mare in Genoa, with works in dialogue with CNR ISMAR in Genoa and data collected by marine robots, and performed at the opening with musicians on the submarine “Nazario Sauro”. He is now on tour with the album “ARCA” with a show between music, science, astronomy, environmental protection and popularisation. Zannier has been selected by the City of Venice as Artist-in-Residence DVRI 2023, with a wide-ranging exhibition of concerts, sound installations and works on the theme of habitat, backup, extinction, hosted by various institutions such as CNR ISMAR, the Venice Conservatory, the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation and Ca’Foscari University.
Opening: Friday, 2. June 2023, 6pm – 9pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, 3. June – Friday, 7. July 2023
To the Gallery
Image caption: HYPERCONNECTIONS, Banner, ©Luisa Catucci Gallery
Exhibition Alessandro Zannier – Luisa Catucci Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin – Contemporary Art – Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
