Mustafa Sabbagh – XI commandment: You shall not forget, 21 May 2016 — 17 Jul 2016
Exhibitions

Mustafa Sabbagh – XI commandment: You shall not forget

It will be the huge ZAC ai Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa industrial archaeology area – located in Palermo, Sicily – to host the first retrospective exhibition of Mustafa Sabbagh, whose inauguration is scheduled for Saturday, May 21, 2016.

The exhibition, promoted by the Department of Culture of the City of Palermo, carries on the brand new programming season, launched last year, which soon brought to national and international attention the ZAC area.

The invitation addressed to Mustafa Sabbagh confirms, on the part of the Administration, the strong and coherent commitment to build a cultural programming mindful of human rights such as of great challenges of the current millennium’s beginning, bringing back in the frontline imperishable questions concerning the entire mankind, doing so through great names of international contemporary art.

2000 square meters for a former industrial hangar dating back to the early twentieth century, in which there will be exposed more than 75 photographic artworks among Sabbagh’s most famous ones, 10 video artworks and three new site-specific video-installations, as well as the photographic installation which has been acquired by the roman MAXXI Museum of XXI Century Arts’ permanent contemporary art collection, here presented in preview – the same as several unedited artworks that the artist has chosen to baptize in Palermo.
In the idea of the artist, which stands out as the exhibition’s curator too, ZAC will be designed as a contemporary schizophrenia’s container, a large closet living on its disorder and its owner’s psychosis; metaphor for a disoriented humanity, schizophrenic in concealing his own fears, each one here catalogued by Sabbagh. A humankind which is forgetting its own humanity, its individual or social urgency of integration, asking for a social duty as a secular commandment starting from Palermo: You shall not forget.

You shall not forget  in Onore al Nero, photographic series that made Sabbagh worldwide renowned, personal reflection and social challenge moving from each one’s individual dark side, subverting conventions through #000’s multidimensionality, and recalling history of art by means of its own reinterpretation.
You shall not forget  in Candido, unedited project, secular absolution granted by those who know how to share the blame through pristine eyes – and bloody hands – of a child, as in Das Unheimliche, in Freudian memory, in which blood stains the adult expectation regarding the different.
You shall not forget  in Chat Room, love letter/symphony of pain from a poor fellow-Christ to a poor devil-Judas, and in Dark Room, rediscovery of innocence through a voyeuristic act.
You shall not forget  in anthro_pop_gonia, video-installation also unedited in Italy, Ariadne’s thread from the history of Greek mythology to the history of contemporary vices.
You shall not forget  in Made in Italy © – Handle with care, cynical slap in the face of questions whispered, not shouted – as all the revolution’s harbingers ones should be. What’s the true meaning of foreign body  within an infected by obtuseness society? Useless attempting to forget it, in front of the seriality of a crime perpetrated by man to man, drowned in the black of the installation 09.2015: 3944 – specially conceived for Palermo.

As for Palermo, to highlight its soul deeply steeped in art and contamination, the artist has set up a collaboration with the prestigious Sicilian galleries FPAC Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea and Rizzuto Gallery, internationally appreciated realities thanks to their recognizable research – different in their artistic semantics, common in their high aim-related quality, where he decided to exhibit two unedited artworks, as if they were two connective synapses to discover into the reticulated nervous system of the city; works of art thought in relation to the peculiarities of the two spaces in which they are welcomed. A triangulation not to forget that ‘diversity’ is another way of defining ‘richness’.
«A schizophrenic does not forget; a schizophrenic accumulates», writes the artist, «as in a multiple personality disorder, as in a zapping out of control». In the concept of this new exhibition design, works of art by Mustafa Sabbagh rebel against the predictability of a philological order, to break into inescapable contradictions.

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