From 28 September 2012 to 20 January 2013 the GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo hosts the exhibition project The Log-O-Rithmic, for the 6th Edition of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize.

Fredi Fischli has been proposed last year by Nicolaus Schafhausen (at that time Director and Curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam and next Director of the Kunsthalle in Wien), and awarded in November 2011 from an international panel composed by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Director GAMeC), Alex Farquharson (Director, Nottingham Contemporary) and Viktor Misiano (Editor in Chief, Moscow Art Magazine) at the end of Qui. Enter Atlas – International Symposium of Emerging Curators during which 14 curators under 35 have discussed the theme ‘The Billiard Effect. Exhibition Histories in the Making’.

The jury has awarded Fredi Fischli’s project as the best one with the following statement:
We chose a project that was very much engaged with the processes of artistic production – and making these essential to act of presentation. With this exhibition the artists are very much centre stage. These are all artists with a certain currency at the moment and the proposal was well calibrated to the scale and possibilities of this exhibition opportunity.

The Log-O-Rithmic exhibition is inspired by the work The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule, an ephemeral work created by architects Trix and Robert Haussmann. Both were educated in the context of Swiss Modernism, but eventually evolved their approach to the practice.
In 1967, they began their collaborative work with Anti-Chair, a fragile chair made of neon tubes, and also opened Allgemeine Entwurfsanstalt, a space dedicated to architecture and design. In addition to a wide range of realized buildings and furniture designs, the duo has created a rich body of theoretical works that renegotiate entrenched ideas about architecture. In 1980, Robert Haussmann visited a sanatorium to recover from an illness. It was during this time, when he was physically unable to work, that the couple created The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule. This playful device is based on a very bureaucratic principle inspired by the OuLiPo movement . Due to its combinatory potential, it paradoxically creates infinite varieties of imaginative architecture, language and images.

On the occasion of the exhibition at the GAMeC, seven contemporary artists have been invited to activate the experimental device and reprocess it for their own specific purpose. The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule is applied as a denominator and serves as a starting point for the exhibition.

The works by Uri Aran, Karl Holmqvist, Kaspar Müller, Ken Okiishi, Oliver Payne, Emanuel Rossetti and Anicka Yi (video installations, paintings, sculptures and drawings) analyse language and writing from different perspectives, ‘playing’ with the letters of the alphabet, with the aim of creating a new lexicon and understanding the multiple (and sometimes hidden) meanings of words and objects.

The exhibition has been staged with the support of Swiss Institute