Casting Down Falsehood by Truth
As of Saturday 25 June, some of Siena’s finest historic buildings are opening to the public as part of the exhibition entitled Che il vero possa confutare il falso – Casting Down Falsehood by Truth, a show featuring works of contemporary art from the AGIVERONA Collection, curated by Luigi Fassi and Alberto Salvadori.
“The dialogue between the present and the past, between contemporary languages and classical artistic languages, constitutes the common underlying thread that accompanies the activities of Santa Maria della Scala throughout 2016,” says Daniele Pitteri, Director of the museum complex, who goes on to say, “May Reality Refute Falsehood is not just one stage in this process, it constitutes the first building block in a project designed to bring more and more ambitious national and international experiences to Siena able to engage in dialogue, in a way that is dynamic and open to the future, with the city’s artistic and creative energies”.
The exhibition is part of the initiatives included in ITINERA, a project devised and directed by the Fuoricampo Association with the Culturing Association, in collaboration with the Municipal Council of Siena. The project is aimed at supporting young generations via the mobility of artists and cultural operators between Tuscany and Belgium, and contact between them, and also the formation of new enthusiasts and supporters of contemporary languages. In this respect, the exhibition of this collection, one of the most enlightened in Italy, represents a model of support for artistic production, drawing attention to the practices of contemporary collectors, to the new forms of patronage in the field of art, and to the new formulas for collaboration which are currently becoming established between artists and collectors.
AGIVERONA Collection came into being in the 1960s. Up until the 1980s, its interest was focused on major contemporary masters, after which it shifted its attention to young artists. The aim of the AGIVERONA Collection is to promote projects dedicated to contemporary art, and to support the activity of young international artists, and to finance, in the long term, the opening of a space for cultural formation, open to the public, linked to contemporary art. The collection comprises several works whose dates of creation coincide primarily with the date when they were acquired. These include the following acquisitions: in the 1980s, Arienti, in 1991 Cattelan, in 1999 Jim Lambie, in 2000 Adel Abdessamed, Chen Zhen and the first video by Anri Sala, then Subodh Gupta in 2001, and Tino Sehgal in 2003 (for both these artists it was the first acquisition by a foreign collection), Simon Starling in 2004, Susan Phillips in 2008, and, more recently, in 2012, the young Vanessa Safavi and the young artist Ibrahim Mahama, who exhibited with a site-specific installation at the 56th Venice Biennale.
“Ignorance, Awareness, and Research are the three phases that mark my career, and my growth as a collector”, says Giorgio Fasol, who goes on to add: “Passion and knowledge are at the foundation of everything. I like to take risks, to gamble on young artists, and allow myself to be caught up in a love at first sight, beyond all reasonable doubt… Most of the time, luck is on my side, and the artists I back often achieve important successes also at the international level… I travel a lot, I can’t count how many kilometers I’ve travelled, but my adrenaline allows me to never be tired, and to stay attentive, watchful and curious, always.”
AGIVERONA Collection’s “Projects for Art” is a crowdfunding platform that is aimed at financing artistic projects. It was developed with the purpose of exploring the new dynamics of widespread patronage of the arts, linked to support for young artists. This with a view to opening up the world of art collecting and artistic production to the new logics of the participatory market, typical of the sharing economy. Unlike the usual custom, instead of rewarding donors on the basis of individuals’ personal contributions, the platform rewards those who make most efforts for the success of the project, involving other people in gathering funds. In this way, people have incentives in becoming ambassadors for the project, spreading information about it among other potential supporters. Since AGIVERONA Collection is the sponsor of the crowdfunding platform, and has always devoted itself to supporting young artists, it was decided to symbolically inaugurate “Projects for Art” also by proposing as the first project to be financed the exhibition of the collection itself, which represents an example of the promotion and support of the work of young artists.
