Gallery Museum

The ar/ge kunst Gallery Museum of Bolzano is situated in the Via Museo road near the South Tyrolean Archaeological Museum.

The Gallery Museum presents a year up to 7 show regional and international artists.

Buchhandlung Kalter König

Sven Sachsalber

From February, 22 to April, 13 2019

Opening February, 22 2019 at 7 pm

Curated by Emanuele Guidi

The exhibition "Buchhandlung Kalter König" by Sven Sachsalber gathers together a body of recent works that employ and engage with the format of the book in a variety of attitudes and approaches.

Through writing and drawing, accumulation and appropriation, quotation and violation, Sachsalber uses the name of an ideal publishing house or personal bookshop to make public the complex constellation of figures that permeate his imagery and development. At the same time he also traces a line of continuity between the alpine landscape where he was born and his adoptive city of New York.

The titular work "Buchhandlung Kalter König" relates to a posthumously published book by Martin Kippenberger: "No Drawing No Cry". This book reproduces the hotel writing paper that Kippenberger had previously published—with drawings—in the two famous volumes "Hotel-Hotel" and "Hotel-Hotel-Hotel", though in this case his instructions were to publish the same stationery "cleansed" of the drawings.

The result was a book of blank sheets of paper showing nothing but the letterheads and logos of the hotels where Kippenberger had stayed.

Sven Sachsalber took this gesture as an invitation to draw on the paper again. To the evident detriment of the material value of this costly edition he has kept a diary in which he undertakes a systematic process of discovery and self-analysis.

In this book Sachsalber has made 222 pencil drawings where contemporary culture, folklore, the animal kingdom and the human world encounter everyday moods and atmospheres.

In reproducing pictures of alpine traditions (years of adverts printed on the back of Artforum magazine for the Swiss Galerie Bruno Bischofberger) he starts to weave together symbols and emblems of the alpine world, from Giacometti's house to San Pellegrino mineral water – "bottled in the same part of the Italian Alps that Sachsalber comes from" – as his biography is at pains to point out.

Temporary Lovers

Parasite 2.0

From March, 23 to May, 4 2019

Opening March, 22 2019 at 6.30 pm

Curated by Emanuele Guidi

Architects Parasite 2.0 (Milan/Brussels) have for years been conducting research that explores the region between wilderness and human habitats. In this way they produce a semantic field where diverse phenomena converge: the internet as a contemporary ecosystem, Biblical deserts, the remnants of modernity and the Temporary Autonomous Zones theorised by Hakim Bey.

Parasite 2.0 have started with the latter for their exhibition at ar/ge kunst. They focus on forms of gathering, tracing a continuous line from the legacy of the radical Italian architects, through the experiences of the free party and rave scenes and right up to the club culture and contemporary music festivals that occupy and capitalize on the imagery of remote and desert spaces.

In these transitory experiences Parasite 2.0 identify a point of view that can be used to question the notion of temporary community. They reveal the subversive potential that arises from it and is absorbed within specific temporalities and around the development of precise technologies and tools.

It is a physical and digital imagery that resonates with ideas such as escape and isolation, alienation and autonomy, tribalism, distant past and future, animality and post-humanity.

ar/ge kunst

ar/ge is an abbreviation of Arbeitsgemeinschaft (working group).

The history and economics of ar/ge kunst, its mission statement and ambitions, its responsibilities towards members and visitors, its relationship to its cultural and political context are here translated into projects for potential installations and performances.