On the occasion of miart 2016, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation and miart present Sarah Lucas – INNAMEMORABILIAMUMBUM, a special contemporary art project by the famous English artist Sarah Lucas curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Vincenzo de Bellis designed for the exceptional setting of the Albergo Diurno Venezia and created in collaboration with the FAI – Fondo Ambiente Italiano and the Municipality of Milan.
On Friday 8, Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 April, during the twenty-first edition of the modern and contemporary art fair in Milan, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation and Miart, in collaboration with the FAI and the Municipality of Milan, invited the artist Sarah Lucas to give life to a project conceived specifically for suggestive spaces of the Diurno designed in the early 2006s by the architect Piero Portaluppi, closed to the public since 9 and recently reopened thanks to the commitment of the FAI and the FAI Delegation of Milan. Inside this temple dedicated to beauty and self-care, sculptures, installations, sound and performative interventions will give life to a three-day event of exhibitions, performances and live happenings whose main theme will be the body, its representation, his stories and the stereotypes that our society still feeds on. For the Venice Day Hotel Sarah Lucas will create a site-specific exhibition intervention, studied for the environment, to which sound and video interventions will be added: Saturday 10 evening with music by the artist and musician Julian Simmons, while on Sunday evening XNUMX April is scheduled for the screening of "family films" made by the English artist.
Irreverent and disarming in their extreme simplicity, the works of Sarah Lucas – photographs, collages, sculptures and drawings – they give life to a theater of ambiguity in which apparently banal materials are transformed into objects of affection that reveal repressed desires and impulses. Since the beginning of her career, placed in the context of the Young British Artists in London in the nineties, Lucas has ridiculed taboos and macho attitudes with her rough and angry sculptures. Her self-portraits, in which she transforms her own image into a character that crosses dozens of photographs, poses and situations, stage female and male myths and stereotypes, transforming roles and sexual genres.
“I like to play with sexual and gender stereotypes [...] they are just constructs, and they are quite fragile”, acknowledges the artist. In the world of Sarah Lucas no subject seems too fragile and no taboo too sacred.
Like a novella Rose Selavy – Marcel Duchamp's female alter ego – Sarah Lucas has therefore split into a gallery of characters with provocative and ambiguous sexuality. In the same way, her sculptures, assembled with cheap objects, found materials or sculpted in shiny bronze surfaces, recall the magical objects of the Surrealists, of which the artist collects the inheritance and the ability to distort everyday life. Lucas combines the convulsive beauty of the Surrealists in a lighter, pop and ironic and at the same time more mysterious and visceral version, full of a new and more direct energy.
The link between the works of Sarah Lucas and the feminist art of the sixties is also very strong, evident above all in her critique of the male gaze: like feminist artists, with her explicit and irreverent works, Lucas also encourages women to appropriate the tools of representation of their own body and its images, inviting them to become familiar with every part of themselves , even with the most intimate ones, and to take care of them.
Precisely because of her obsession with a body represented without filters and preconceptions, Sarah Lucas' work has always been interpreted in a Freudian and psychoanalytic key, so much so that she was among the first living artists to be invited to exhibit inside the Casa - Sigmund Freud museum in London, in 2000.
Sarah Lucas' entire work is therefore a reflection on the body, on its representation and desires and on the need to give women the right to represent themselves, playing with and against the stereotypes of femininity in which their representation is too often forced. And body care, the experience of anatomy as beauty and as trauma are therefore themes that constantly recur in the poetics of the British artist: the Albergo Diurno Venezia – this fascinating but also dark underground world – is therefore the theater perfect for his site-specific project, in a game of mirrors between works, interventions, architecture and history of one of the most evocative places that marked the daily life of Milan in the last century.
With Sarah Lucas – INNAMEMORABILIAMUMBUM, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation and miart continue the collaboration begun in 2013 with the special project Liberi tutti – which enlivened the evenings of the eighteenth edition of the art fair, presenting performances, concerts, interludes and art plays at the Teatro Arsenale in via Cesare Correnti – and in 2014 with Cine Dreams – the art festival that brought installations, multimedia projections, sound and video interventions to the Civico Planetarium Ulrico Hoepli designed specifically for the planetarium and which in just three evenings attracted more of 4.000 people.
In collaboration with Miart, and thanks to the fundamental synergy with the FAI and the Municipality of Milan, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation continues with Sarah Lucas – INNAMEMORABILIAMUMBUM in its action of support and enhancement of the most original expressions of contemporary art and culture, bringing the more experimental languages of our time in the spaces of the Albergo Diurno Venezia, built between 1923 and 1925 on a project attributed to Piero Portaluppi and officially inaugurated on 18 January 1926. In addition to the public baths and body care services (barber shop, hairdresser, manicure, pedicure), the hotel also included a post office, an exchange office, a telephone, a left-luggage and valuables deposit, a travel agency, a bank counter, a typing service, a laundry and ironing service for clothes, a clothing sale and a personal use. It was also equipped with an avant-garde radio broadcasting system, planned for the entire hall area. After a progressive abandonment of the spaces by the commercial establishments, the Albergo Diurno Venezia closed definitively to the public in 2006. Following various expressions of interest in the space, in May 2015 the FAI signed an agreement with the Municipality of Milan committing to develop and support a restoration and enhancement project in view of a future reopening of the structure to the public.
For the first time ever in its ninety-year history, the Albergo Diurno hosts a site-specific contemporary art project.
Sarah Lucas – INNAMEMORABILIAMUMBUM is a project conceived and produced by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation and Miart, in collaboration with the FAI and the Municipality of Milan, as part of the twenty-first edition of the fair.
Schedule of days and times
Friday April 8th
Sarah Lucas – INNAMEMORABLE AMUMBUM
press preview from 11.00 – 13.00 | by invitation only RSVP required
open to the public from 13.00 to 19.00 | reservation required
opening from 19.00 to 22.00 | reservation required
Saturday April 9th
open to the public from 12.00 to 20.00 | reservation required
Music by Julian Simmos from 20.00 to 23.00 | reservation required
Sunday April 10
open to the public from 12.00 to 20.00 | reservation required
“Family films” from 20.00 to 23.00 | reservation required
Entrances and reservations:
Free admission with reservations required, by sending an email to rsvp@fondazionenicolatrussardi.com
During opening hours, admissions are divided into 30-minute increments (at 00 and 30 each hour). Last admission 30 minutes before closing.
Reservations will only be accepted complete with day, time and full names of all the people for whom you intend to book.
