Exhibition Dance Me To The End Of Love at PAC in Milan

Nine stations, stages of an exhibition route that explores “places of memory” through contemporary art, between installations and video art, trace the path of the Performing PAC collective, bringing together works Yael Bertana, Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas GordonMiguel Gomez Christian BoltanskiClementia Echeverri, Maia Bajevic, Giulio Squillacciotti, Ottonella Moccellin AND Nicholas Pellegrini.

Dance me to the end of love, exhibition at the PKK and memory of the massacre

Dance with me until the end of lovename borrowed from Leonard Cohen deeply inspired by the history and suffering of the Holocaust, it perfectly embodies the concept of “timelessness”. July 27, 1993 belongs precisely to this category, a day that leaves a hard-to-heal wound in the city of Milan, inflicted on the heart on a sultry summer evening. A car bomb killed five people, completely gutting the PKK, undermining the integrity of the institution and national cultural authority. A real full-scale massacre, without real instigators and targeted goals, in a literally deserted city.
Marco Bova AND Simon Zekki they start from this tragic event, digging through the archives and news of the Pavilion in order to maniacally reconstruct that two-year period of 1992-1993, which irrevocably turned the history of political, social and public opinion in Italy.

Works at the PKK Exhibition: Contemporary Art for Remembrance

For the exhibition, the archives are distributed permutation Between the paces work symbol Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944 – 2021) already exhibited at the PAC in 2005, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, during a solo exhibition of the artist moving along the speculation around the inexorable passage of time.
Beam Germany this is a monumental work Yael Bartana (Israel, 1970), which initially welcomes visitors. An androgynous queen with an Aryan imprint, difficult to place in space-time, appears on the back of a donkey in a Berlin haunted by the ghosts of a past that has never been fully resolved. Douglas Gordon (Glasgow, 1966) is the protagonist of a suggestive projection, played endlessly to heighten the viewer’s immersion by enveloping him with the power of memory. The complex work tells, often with the help of gloomy and dirty images, about the journey from Berlin to Warsaw of two musicians filming the opposite movement to Germany, made in 1939 by their relatives from occupied Poland. Colombian Clemencia Echeverri (Salamina, 1950) presents a video installation of great emotional impact, a memorial service, concreted by a double projection of the rushing waters of the Cauca River. While the spectacle takes over the staging Ottonella Mosellin

(Milan, 1966) e Nicholas Pellegrini (Milan, 1966), which reveal So far, so close 2003 installation about the duality of collective and individual memory.
Maya Baevich (Sarajevo, 1967) presents her personal and intimate version green green grass from homeborrowing a wonderful song from a touching reference to the return and the walls of the house. The Bosnian artist bases the deepest meaning of this video installation, dated 2002, on memories of her grandparents’ house destroyed by the war in Yugoslavia.

Maurizio Cattelan and the Via Palestro Massacre

Small showcases contain Maurizio Cattelan (Padua, 1960) unusual, intimate and not flashy. There are two finished works, dated 1994 and created about a year after the massacre, using ordinary objects, fetishes of everyday use, embedded in the collective imagination. A series of tied handkerchiefs is ready to dry the tears of the victims of the attack, expanding the meaning into a kind of universal ballad that can absorb much more pain. Souvenirs from Milan – a colorful children’s camera with which you can admire a series of postcards. If in the tourist outposts we found the stereotypical glorification of the greatest Italian monuments, here, with a provocative inversion, the dramatic and terrifying images of the destroyed PKK alternate, introducing a very grotesque playful dimension. However, Cattelan is one of the few artists who thought about the tragic event that took place on Via Palestro. Collective memory and individual memory are opposed to each other. in an intense dialogue between the rooms, projected along the entire route of the exhibition, inviting the visitor to explore the works through an inner and personal discovery, interspersed with a long and necessary comparison with History.
The PKK again, through an operation that is not self-referential, manages to talk about itself and what it was, through personal, intimate and private stories that become narratives that we all can and must, sooner or later, account for, seeking universal meaning. .

David Merlo