The 2020 exhibition season of the GAMeC in Bergamo, curated for the third year by Director Lorenzo Giusti, will open in February. From the great luminous works by Daniel Buren to the second chapter of the Trilogia della Materia, via the 10th edition of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize and a new project of residencies for artists in collaboration with Fundación PROA, the museum program will continue to investigate the less obvious languages of modern art and to valorize the heritage of the city of Bergamo using innovative formats, maintaining its attention on international contemporary creativity and placing the GAMeC at the heart of an increasingly solid cultural network.

February 13 – May 17 2020
ANTONIO ROVALDI
The Sound of The Woodpecker Bill (Il suono del becco del picchio)


The exhibition Il suono del becco del picchio, hosted from February 13 to May 17, 2020 at the Accademia Carrara venue in Bergamo, constitutes the second chapter of the project End. Words from the Margins, New York City, promoted by the GAMeC in partnership with Harvard University (Graduate School of Design), the Kunstmuseum of St Gallen, and Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring (NY), with which the artist was awarded the support of the fifth call of the Italian Council, the program promoting Italian contemporary art around the world, held by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

Curated by Lorenzo Giusti, Director of the GAMeC, together with Steven Handel, Visiting Professor of Ecology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Francesca Benedetto, Design Critic, the exhibition—like the project itself—constitutes a eulogy of waking, of the physical crossing of the most marginal of spaces, and is based on the idea that it is from these
very limits—not only geographical but also political and anthropological—that a conscientious rebirth of society may be developed.

The project presents the most iconic metropolis in the world from the point of view of its city limits and the outermost edges of its five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island—which Rovaldi traced with his walking project, rendering the artist’s experience through a photographic series capable of representing its complexity.


 June 4 – August 30 2020
DANIEL BUREN

Daniel Buren, the famous French artist known throughout the world for his environmental installations and his textile works, presents a series of new works in optical fiber in the prestigious context of the Sala delle Capriate of the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, which for the third year in a row serves as the GAMeC’s summer exhibition venue.

Luminous fabrics, in which the geometric patterns characteristic of the artist’s research alternate, will take up the central space of the room, creating an itinerary of great visual intensity, capable of renewing the surrounding environment by activating a new dialogue with the paintings and ancient frescoes on the walls. Presented for the first time in Italy, Buren’s optic fiber works are the most advanced result of artistic research carried out over 50 years.

 

June 4 – August 30 2020
IN THE FOREST, EVEN THE AIR BREATHES
Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize, 10th Edition

At the same time as the Buren exhibition, the exhibition In The Forest, Even The Air Breathes opens to the public. The show is curated by Abhijan Toto, the Indian curator and winner of the 10th edition of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art – EnterPrize. The project is inspired by research on the so-called Curriculum Forest, a philosophy of the Earth that promotes the need for a localized cosmo-political conception of our current ecological era. The exhibition focuses on the cosmological systems of Zomia, a wooded belt that runs from North-Eastern India to the Cordilleras of the Philippines, imagining new forms of politics and pedagogy to make man’s relationship with the land he inhabits more intimate. The exhibition, based on some central issues of the Curriculum Forest, considers Zomia in perspective, and includes works by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Soe Yu Nwe, Sung Tieu, Karl Castro, Robert Zhao Renhui, Joydeb Roaja, and Nguyen Trinh Thi.

 

October 22, 2020 – February 21, 2021
NULLA È PERDUTO
Arte and matter in transformation

Nulla è perduto is the second chapter of the great multi-year exhibition project dedicated to the theme of matter. After Black Hole. Arte e matericità tra Informe e Invisibile, an exhibition dedicated to the essence of matter in dialogue with the theories of modern physics, this second stage, curated by Anna Daneri and Lorenzo Giusti, looks at the work of authors who have investigated the transformation of matter to develop a reflection on change and time. The display features works from various periods, ranging from 17th-century allegorical paintings to Dada and Surrealist works, to the creations of some of the most leading exponents of the neo-avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies. Not to mention works by members of the Arte Povera movement, sculptures, and installations by artists of the Eighties, up to the most recent research by international artists of the latest generations. 

 

RESIDENCIES, VIDEO ART AND THE IMPERMANENT COLLECTION

The GAMeC’s 2020 program is further enhanced by projects and initiatives, such as collaboration with the Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires for the ON AIR – ARGENTINA-ITALIA ART RESIDENCY program, designed to stimulate exchanges of experiences aimed at enhancing the artistic potential of the two countries. In alternate years, a couple of artists—one Italian and one Argentinean—and a couple of curators are involved. For this first edition, GAMeC has invited the Argentinean artist Irina Kirchuk (1983).

Back in the spaces of the museum once more is ARTISTS’ FILM INTERNATIONAL: the prestigious network dedicated to video art that since 2008 has involved some of the most important international contemporary art institutions, with artists from all over the world. The 12th edition of the exhibition will focus on ‘language’ as its theme.

Finally, the cycle of exhibitions continues titled LA COLLEZIONE IMPERMANENTE, an exhibition platform inaugurated in 2018 and conceived as a research tool on the museum’s heritage. The third stage of this project of reflection on collecting and the policies of acquisition and curatorial experimentation presents a series of works from the Collection created during the 2000s—from Berlinde de Bruyckere to Yan Pei-Ming, from Gelitin to Latifa Echakhch—providing a cross-section of some of the most significant artistic languages explored over the first 20 years of the new millennium.