EVGENY ANTUFIEV
Dead Nations: Golden Age Version
curated by Marina Dacci
September 21 > October 27, 2019
What of our history should we put in a Time capsule?
What traces are we leaving behind?
The church of San Giuseppe delle Scalze opens its doors to the works by Evgeny Antufiev in its mysterious semi-darkness and its open wounds.
The project is an inventory, a distillation of our identity, a visual narrative of values, frailty, yearning for power and immortality, which have marked our history. … Antufiev leaves traces, a sort of “legacy” from a dead, or soon to end, epoch, which however yearns to speak to posterity, driven by a sort of horror vacui, the fear of disappearing and becoming extinct.
The artist has to engage with a religious architecture; he explores the idea of a church meant not only as a place of worship, but also as the repository of a narrative of the human history, the essence of humanity: replete with signs and secrets to unveil. Space is explored as a Time capsule, a spacecraft bringing travelers from the future to discover artifacts and symbolic objects testifying of what humans have made and left behind. The notion of immortality in memory is not new: here Antiquity and the Futuristic blend together in a sort of game surrounded by mystery.
The entire exhibition is a tale open to multiple interpretations which deconstruct the spatiotemporal dimension where energy develops in a circular process, also thanks to a formal intermingling of pop with a reinterpretation of classical culture.
Excerpt from Marina Dacci's text
