Alessandro Sambini: People at an exhibition

Michela Rizzo presents People at an exhibition by Alessandro Sambini, the first solo exhibition of a young artist among the most interesting of the contemporary Italian art scene.

With this project, curated by Denis Isaia, Alessandro Sambini develops his research on the image’s status in the age of Internet. Installation, live TV, performance and photography melt together in the gallery, where visitors find themselves being spectator and spectacle at the same time. Actor and voyeur, in a journey that transforms the visit of the exhibition into an exercise of awareness of shared mechanisms and rituality.

Alessandro Sambini (Rovigo, 1982) through photography, video and the use of multimedia platforms, reflects about the need and the ways of image production, their traffic and spread, the different areas of relation between images and public. His work has been exhibited internationally in public and private spaces, among these: in 2016 Kunsthaus of Graz, Galleria Viasaterna of Milan, Galleria MLZ of Trieste; in 2015 Serra dei Giardini in Venice; in 2014 Museo di Fotografia of Cinisello Balsamo, Triennale, Milan; in 2011 Festival Europeo della Fotografia di Reggio Emilia, GD4Photoart, Chiostri di San Domenico, Reggio Emilia; Pinacoteca Nazionale of Bologna; in 2009 Museion, Museo di Arte Contemporanea of Bolzano, James Taylor Gallery of London and Palazzo Ducale, Genova.

The curator writes: “A prerequisite is the formative influences caused by images on the subjectivity. The contemporary subject that, as Pop Art has widely shown, is defrauded from the possibility of contributing to the construction of collectivity, is found in a simulated comparison with objects that surround him and with the images that those objects represent. Today we know that the caustic world of Pop Art was just the beginning of a complex psychological puzzle founded on the possibility of the image’s reproduction. It is all about a process that, with the advent of digital, suffered a strong acceleration. The easiness of infinite reproduction, rework and mostly the possibility of distribution (what legitimates the existence of an image, whatever it is) are further redefining the system of orientation, or disorientation, of the contemporary subject, destined, not always unwillingly, to a life that exceeds its own physical limits, like the postmodernist theorists have been describing since some years.
We are in front of a panorama lead by the machine and in which the machine is the osmotic medium between image and imaginary and vice versa, the desire and the will, the automatism and the consciousness and viceversa.
With People at an exhibition Alessandro Sambini continues to give his contribution to the so-called web based practices, with a project that, compared to the big collections of pieces that refer to the WWW, maintains not only a critical integrity but a formal originality. From this point of view, People at an exhibition, faces trough the study of the plastic surface, but also digital, the deep radicality of the ongoing change, placing himself in straight connection with big experiments of neo avant-garde from which must be at least remembered the work of Franco Vaccari, Gianikian Ricci Lucchi or Allan Sekula”.