The exhibition 'PUSH THE LIMITS' at Fondazione Merz brings together the voices of 17 artists, including Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson.
The title 'PUSH THE LIMITS' immediately declares the desire to investigate the ability of art to constantly place itself at the limit to shift the axis of thought, perception and discourse, introducing new elements into the system; to say yes or no when 'normality' hesitates; to highlight what is suggested in the present and not to remain still. The artists have seized this opportunity to reaffirm the urgency of liberating the infinity of possibilities.
But what are these limits to push away? Cultural, geographical, identity-related, sexual, social and visionary. Every historical phase has known them and perhaps today the greatest and that groups them all is the lack of a language capable of telling them in order to overcome them. Here then artistic practice comes to our aid again since it is constitutive of art to operate the crossing of boundaries between languages, images, knowledge and to go beyond now cross-eyed, now frontally, one's own time and history.
Each work on display is a push forward into a space where current codes of behavior are suspended and transformation becomes possible; where the as if and the quasi reality allow a flow of multiple visions and vocabularies relating them to different ways of living, experimenting with them and finding new meaning.
The exhibition path entirely invests the spaces of the Foundation and is structured as a continuous discourse; a pressing, of tears, overlaps, questions, of realities already known and that seem overcome but that instead return, of unknown realities that it would be appropriate to penetrate, of incommunicable realities that ask for new words.
Large-scale installations contribute to the definition of an exhibition script capable of providing the visitor with a totally immersive experience of meaning, between different atmospheres, sounds, words, material and chromatic textures. From the political to the symbolic dimension, from philosophical to poetic inspiration: an installation that visually synthesizes the expressive urgency of our time and invites the visitor to define his own trajectory in this continuous landscape.
Testifying to this instance, typical of contemporary art, are some of the most representative female voices of international artistic research, who with their work have declined - in different ways and always relating to the context of belonging - the idea of limit and the very concept of overcoming. Authors who in their creative practice have overcome the stereotyped vocabulary of knowledge, pushing the meanings further.
