Through the words of the sound artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle, the book explores the social and relational component of sound that gave rise to Benevolence, the site-specific project by Sonia Boyce. The Joy of Cacophony is the second book in a series of essay collections inspired by the site-specific projects conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione.
Consisting of a richly illustrated booklet and a record vinyl, this special release accompanies the performative sound-based project A Comparative Dialogue Act by artists Andrea Mancini and the collective Every Island, hosted in the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Conceived as a catalogue and an artist’s book, the publication offers a deeper insight into the eponymous 2022 exhibition staged at Indipendenza Roma, and explores tensions that can be generated between artworks and their surrounding architectural context, raising questions of taste, value, function and decoration.
The practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, 1931) toys with the notion of gender, reconsidering women’s social roles and rights. This monograph, edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani, analyses her work through various languages and features a selection of poems, highlighting the author’s critical and artistic approach.
In her work, Cally Spooner crystallizes an absurd contemporary ecosystem in which entities run the risk of managing themselves and one another to death. Featuring newly commissioned essays alongside a lecture by Spooner, SWEAT SHAME ETC. is the first comprehsive survey of the artist’s output of the last five years.
This new anthology brings together visions, experiences and critical interdisciplinary methodologies that have been instrumental in the development of the language of moving images since 2010. New essays and conversations reflect on radical technological and poetic transformations in the works of the generation of digital native artists.
Edited and with an essay by Pavel Pyś
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2024, English, softcover, 22 x 28 cm
ISBN: 979-12-80579-49-2
Conceived as a catalogue and an artist’s book, the publication was made on occasion of the eponymous 2022 exhibition at Indipendenza Roma. Deeply responsive to the space, the exhibition brought together works by Louise Lawler and Fredrik Værslev to explore the tension between an artwork and its surrounding architectural context, spurring questions of taste, value, function, and decoration.
Louise Lawler’s incisive practice brings to the fore the very means by which value and significance are conferred upon artworks. Her critical strategies reveal the mechanisms by which art is produced, reproduced, consumed to question how we understand issues of authorship, connoisseurship, and meaning. Through emblematic interventions belonging to the series Tracings (2013-present), Adjusted to fit (2010-present), and Paperweights (1988-present) within Indipendenza’s rooms, that once served as an apartment, Lawler’s works draw our attention to how we organize and present our lives to others.
Deeply invested in the relationship between painting, architecture, and both urban and suburban environments, Fredrik Værslev’s serial practice reflects on the conventions, styles, and limits of abstract painting. For this exhibition, Værslev has created a series of site-responsive paintings (2021-22), which are sized to match the doorway dimensions and informed by the palette, materials, texture, and imagery that characterize Indipendenza’s spaces. These trompe l’oeil terrazzo paintings mimic the pattern and treatment of the gallery floor designs, yet are marked with drips and swirls suggestive of the ceiling frescoes that interrupt the all-over treatment, playing on the tension between background and foreground, function and decoration, real and faux.
Seen together, works by Lawler and Værslev point beyond their own limits, drawing our eyes to their surrounding spaces, asking how an artwork’s context can frame its meaning and vice versa.
