2024
MUMAMSHA, A HUNGER, AN ENDLESS FLOW
Artists: Nancy Violet Downs, Chanda Mwamba, Prajvi Mandhani and William Sipling (page image: still from video)
Exhibition of the 4 videos created in the frame of VVV-Residency On VisualcontainerTV from March 15th to April 24th, 2024
Curators: Alessandra Arnò and Simona Da Pozzo.
The exhibition Mumasha, a Hunger, an Endless Flow displays the result of the research and sharing process that began in January with the VVV-R research and audiovisual production residency.
Mumasha, a Hunger, an Endless Flow is the title with which the curators of the VVV-R project, Alessandra Arnò and Simona Da Pozzo, present the process and the works created between January and March as part of the online residency. Thanks to the exploration of images and clips found in the vast sea of the web, with this exhibition, the artists Nancy Violet Downs, Chanda Mwamba, William Sipling and Prajvi Mandhani restore to our vision the process of re-signification of some fragments of the digital imagination collective through four works in a loop.
The works of this artists re-process, with an intersectional critical gaze, the urgencies that run through our daily lives, between web and social. The themes touch on the relationship with the country of origin and its representation outside it, our performing and looking at ourselves online, the relationship between energy and capitalist structures, and the spiritual and connecting role of protest.
On March 13th, the exhibition has been presented in Naples in the frame of MUMASHA event, including talks and meetings with artists. The event is part of the cultural program curated by Nicola Ciancio for SuperOtium and follows this season's theme Look Closer, an invitation to look closely at things to discover their details, depths and imperfections. In this contexts the 4 works made in Uk have been presented together with Bodies Matter and Music.
Bodies Matter: or Of the Substance of the Body is the selection curated by Alessandra Arnò for the Panoramica*23 project dedicated to the research and valorization of video art in Italy. The screening presents the complexity of the representation of the body and the human through the reflections of twelve artists who investigate with heterogeneous languages the relationship between the physical body and the digital simulacrum, between re-mediation of vision and visual suggestions that reach down to the real, raw and current datum. The multiple themes unveil both the obsession of meta-bodies with the virtual world and the anxiety of bodies and self to adapt to the real and the need to deploy themselves in other forms to claim their status. If virtual bodies inhabit digital space and connect to a vision of other-worldliness, where thought becomes a stream of frequencies that deconstruct space and time in a reassuring suspension, flesh-and-blood bodies must defend themselves and fight for their own existence and visibility, and need to confront limits and social conventions, sometimes imagining changing their skin or coexisting and implementing strategies to assert themselves. Within an introspective and visual loop, the viewer is invited to reflect on visible and invisible bodies, and finally, to get involved in a well-known projective psychological exercise.
Music by Piero Chiariello curated by L'Arsenale di Napoli, first presented as a video-installation inside the Circular Hall of Palazzo Fondi, in the program of L'Arsenale di Napoli A special edition repurposed for the colored surfaces of the walls of SuperOtium is presented. Music starts from a video shot, with a fixed camera, of a portion of the pier of the port of Torre del Greco - the artist's town of origin - in a particular light condition, capable of enhancing the contrast between the sky in the background and the architectural element in the foreground crossed by the dark silhouettes of people and birds transformed into a musical score by the artist. As the artist states, “there is so much music around us that we cannot hear.”
PROGRAM March 13, 2024
from 7 to 10 p.m. at SuperOtium
Mumasha, a Hunger, an Endless Flow
this is the river and it still flows, 2’41” Nancy-Violet Downs 2024
endlessly hungry, 3’05’’ Prajvi Mandhani 2024
Ukuba N’go umuntu ku shana (To be human is to dance), 2’35’’ Chanda Mwamba 2024
Flux. Electrical Murmuring, 3’45’’ William Sipling 2024
Bodies Matter
AN ETERNAL IDLENESS, 3’10’’ Matteo Campulla 2023
Gaia – Uni(co)verso, 3’35’’ Silvia De Gennaro 2023
Destruction of the Field, 4’40’’ Enzo Cillo 2023
RED, 5’ DEHORS/AUDELA 2023
Le mot couleur, 1’ Carlo Galbiati 2023
In between, 4’20’’ Massimiliano Marianni 2023
Mon rire est cascade, 2’40’’ Anouk Chambaz 2023
Nettuno: Birth of a Shell, 7’ Emma Scarafiotti 2023
Practicing Defence, 15’ Sara Bonaventura 2023
La zattera della Medusa, 3’14’’ Gianni Barelli 2023
Data, 10’ Mariangela Bombardieri 2023
The Rorschach programme – number 1, 4’ Duccio Ricciardelli e Marco Bartolini 2023
Music
video site-specific installation by Piero Chiariello
