EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK

Harlem Studio Fellowship presents:

Cohabitations: Studies on Beasts, Plants, and Objects

Featuring: Leone Contini Bonacossi, Federico Donelli, Gianni Moretti

Work in progress: On the Block, by Susy Blu

Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida

December 13, 2007 – January 10, 2008, by appointment

 Harem Studio Fellowship (HSF) is pleased to present Cohabitations: Studies on Beasts, Plants, and Objects, an exhibition showing works and projects realized by HSF fellows during their stay in New York (October-December 2007). Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, Cohabitations includes three Italian artists: Leone Contini Bonacossi, Federico Donelli, and Gianni Moretti.

Cohabitations: Studies on Beasts, Plants, and Objects focuses on parallel levels of unnatural coexistences in wrong habitats.

Leone Contini Bonacossi has provoked, composed, and documented germinations of seeds and tubers in artificial contexts, desperate rituals of resurrection in the Whole Food era. American Baroque is an installation at the first floor, where Contini’s pale germinations grow in a former ice-house. The red light and the artificial sound of nature (composed by Lorenzo Brusci) create an overlapping between different evocations: Christian relics, Adonic cults and metropolitan evocations of a idealized nature/natural life.My Ancestors – Columbus Circle is a photographic tryptic: healthy sprouts that are sold at Columbus circle as modern elixir of life, are shown here as small holy pictures. Wheat Seeds Germinating Inside two Jazz-Trumpet Cases Lined with Blue and Red Velvet, Found in the Garbage a Few Days Ago Right Here in Harlem, is a reference to the Mediterranean association of germinating cereals to the Resurrection of Christ. The reflection developed here is on the popular imagery of the Harlem Renaissance.