Mind the Gap is a project dedicated to contemporary visual arts, with a focus on images in motion which, drawing inspiration from Franco Basaglia, pursues an idea of culture conceived as a tool to activate and involve people, places, and communities around contemporary issues with an interdisciplinary approach.
The exhibition of the project’s eighth edition, curated by Lorenzo Lazzari, is entitled Come costruisci le immagini dell’altro? (How do you construct images of otherness?). The works, on display at Casa Cavazzini, Udine’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, are put in relation with one another in order to highlight some ways in which Western culture has built, across recent History as well as less recent, the image of alterity with the aim of legitimizing colonial power and dominion through art history, mental health, technological progress, cinema, and new media. The title of the exhibition is drawn from a conceptual operation by Alfredo Jaar. In 2013, the Chilean artist put new meaning into a quote by American photographer Ansel Adams, «You do not take a photograph. You make it», by creating multiple large prints of the phrase that the audience could take and keep. This action completed Jaar’s artwork by stressing the difference between take and make. Every image is not just a simple cut-out of the world, but stands as a determinate conception of it, while everything that lies inside of it, which we often take for granted, is, on the contrary, constructed.
Moving from this reflection, five film artworks by Invernomuto (Italy), Gelare Khoshgozaran (Iran), Little Warsaw (Hungary), Stefan Kruse (Denmark), and Eleonora Roaro (Italy) are exhibited at Casa Cavazzini together with a film screening by Caterina Erica Shanta (Italy) at Cinema Visionario. The aim is to raise questions about the ways in which we build the images we use to overwrite desires, needs, cultures and bodies.
The eighth edition of Mind The Gap is characterized by an important growth and institutionalization of the project, with a more widespread and scattered presence on the territory of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region and its cities’ suburban areas: the exhibition held at the museum venue of the Civici Musei di Udine is actually integrated with a dense program of participatory artistic workshops for the schools, and educational activities characterized by interdisciplinary insight, involving not only the artists present in the show, but also various speakers from universities and cultural institutions, in order to combine artistic perspectives with historical, sociological, scientific and philosophical approaches.
Next to the main exhibition, Mind the Border is an unprecedented artist in residence project aimed at the production of a new artwork by artist and director Anouk Chambaz (Switzerland), revolving around Gorizia and Nova Gorica, which will be appointed European Capitals of Culture together in 2025.