Thirty-four places including public and private museums, galleries, ateliers, collections and non-profit spaces that will host exhibitions, performances, meetings and events this year linked by a single common thread: the Renaissance Colleoni – Baglioni tarot deck, partly preserved in Bergamo, which inspired Italo Calvino "The Castle of Crossed Destinies".
An entire weekend dedicated to contemporary art, with exhibitions and events capable of involving over 100 artists, including established signatures on the international scene such as Adrian Paci, Masbedo, Klaus Rinke, Ryan McGinley and emerging artists such as James Hoff, Gabriele De Santis, Ettore Favini, passing seamlessly from painting to performance, from video art to street art, from photography to installation experiences. The sixth edition of The Blank ArtDate returns to Bergamo, an ever-growing appointment that involves the main cultural players of the city with a rich program of initiatives. From Friday 13 to Sunday 15 May 2016, thirty-four spaces will participate in the initiative, hosting exhibitions and meetings, talks, concerts and performances: ranging from important institutions – Accademia Carrara, GAMeC, Spazio ALT – Arte Lavoro Territorio, ArtUp Banca Popolare of Bergamo, Bernareggi Museum, Bergamo Film Meeting, Botanical Gardens – in the art galleries (ARS Arte+Libri, Thomas Brambilla Gallery, Elleni Gallery, Marelia Gallery, Triangoloarte Gallery, Marco Fioretti Art Studio, Vanna Casati Studio, Traffic Gallery , viamoronisedici/spazio arte) passing through the studios of the artists who have chosen to live and work in Bergamo and the initiatives of the various non-profit entities that animate the entire territory, extending the ArtDate experience to the nearby Treviglio, Alzano Lombardo, Stezzano .
For the first time The Blank ArtDate adopts a unitary concept, which directly links the city's art scene today to its more illustrious past. Each event in the program is associated with one of the cards from the famous Colleoni – Baglioni tarot deck, created in 1451 and believed to have belonged to Francesco Sforza, which over the centuries passed through the collections of some of the most important noble families of the city. A priceless jewel, today divided into three different nuclei: 35 of the 74 surviving cards of the pack (out of an original total of 78) are in fact in the Morgan Library in New York, the remainder in Bergamo, 26 in the Accademia Carrara and 13 in the private collection of the Colleoni family.
Each space was then linked to a specific card, with the invitation to leave the artists involved free to interpret the message and meaning of this particular referent, following in the footsteps of Italo Calvino. It is precisely as an introduction to the volume Tarocchi - the Visconti deck between Bergamo and New York, published by Franco Maria Ricci in 1969, that the writer published the first version of his The castle of crossed destinies, later destined to live independently in short novel form.
The Special Talks program is aimed specifically at Calvino's experience and at the symbology of the tarot in Western art and culture, with the semiologist Paolo Fabbri as protagonists, the philosopher Umberto Galimberti and William Voelkle, chief curator of the manuscripts department medieval and renaissance collections from the Morgan Library in New York. The latter will be the main guest of the inaugural conference of Art Date together with Nicolò Colleoni, representative of the Colleoni family, Emanuela Daffra, director of the Carrara Academy, Stefano Raimondi, president of The Blank, Nadia Ghisalberti, councilor for culture of the Municipality of Bergamo.
School Day takes place on Friday 13 May: the students of the 15 high school classes who took part in the TB Educational | Talk with the Artists, will be guided by the staff of The Blank to discover a preview of the exhibitions scheduled for ArtDate through three different itineraries.
The Blank ArtDate is conceived and created by the cultural association The Blank under the patronage of the Lombardy Region and the Municipality of Bergamo, with the support of the Banca Popolare di Bergamo ONLUS Foundation, the Credito Bergamasco Foundation, the Bergamo Community Foundation ONLUS.
