Starting with artist Adrian Paci (My) Art Histories, an initiative born from the desire to involve international artists in a journey of research and discovery of the many stories a single artwork can tell. The artist, who is both subject and author of the story, has been invited to shine a new light on the work of other “fellow travellers” from the present and the past. Every year, a different artist will host a cycle of five lessons, accompanied by meetings and conferences, and then captured in a publication.

Acclaimed on the international scene, since the late 1990s Adrian Paci (born 1969 in Shkodra, Albania, lives in Milan) has developed an artistic practice that includes video, film, painting, photography, and installations.

One of the central themes of his work is displacement, which he explores representing the global migration with a metaphorical language, as changeable as personal memory and the relationships among history, reality, and the moving image. Paci belongs to a generation of artists who have embraced the concept of storytelling by combining narration, formal rigour, and social reflection to translate poetic and problematic visions of political and human transformations. His first works were influenced by the cultural climate of the former Eastern bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the theme of immigration combined with a reflection on the role of images in the narration of existences. Starting from this core – in which autobiography and culture overlap – the artist has expanded the boundaries of his work over the years, exploring universal themes such as loss, the movement of people in space and time, and the search for a human and geographical elsewhere.

With Paci and the artists who would follow him, art history enters the private sphere of the narrator who, without speaking directly about his work, feeds on their own biography to choose who or what to tell about, what order to give to the story, and indirectly reflects on the reasons behind their choice to become an artist, and on the work of art as a necessity.

LESSON CALENDAR

Thursday, November 17th, 2022, at 6.30 pm

Thursday, December 15th, 2022, at 6.30 pm

Friday, February 10th, 2023, at 6.30 pm

Thursday, October 26th, 2023, at 6.30 pm

Thursday, November 16th, 2023, at 6.30 pm

Venue: XNL Piacenza, via Santa Franca, 36.

Free admission, subject to seat availability

info@xnlpiacenza.it

The project (My) Art Histories (inspired by models of artist’s historiographic storytelling, such as the Dia Art Foundation’s lecture series “Artists on Artists”) is motivated by the desire to find new interdisciplinary and intergenerational reading pathways, and to help emphasise the inclusive power of contemporary art history in school education.

The voice of the artist and their unique point of view, the possibility of drawing inspiration from the past and turning it into a tool to interpret the complexity of the present, are the main axes used to convey meanings, themes, and open questions about the sense – or non-sense – of art, and to encourage the audience to develop their own point of view.

The objective is to generate a series of individual paths offering unprecedented readings of a collective wealth of creative knowledge that, as the English poet, critic and writer Herbert Read wrote as early as 1943, was and has been “a fundamental model of social evolution”.

Adrian Paci (1969, Shkodra, Albania) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana. In 1997 he moved to Milan, where he currently lives and works. During his artistic career, he has had solo exhibitions in various international institutions: Haifa Museum of Arts (2022); Kunstalle Krems (2019); Museo Novecento, Florence ( 2017); MAC; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2014); Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea – PAC, Milan (2014); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); National Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtina (2012); Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2010); Bloomberg Space, London (2010); Center for Contemporary Art – CCA, Tel Aviv (2009); Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (2007); MoMA PS1, New York (2006); and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005).

Among various group exhibitions, Adrian Paci’s works have been shown at: 14th International Venice Architecture Biennale (2014); 48^th and 51^st International Venice Biennale (1999 and 2005); 15th Sydney Biennale (2006); 15th Rome Quadriennale, where he won the first prize (2008); Lyon Biennale (2009); and 4th Thessaloniki Biennale (2013).

His works can be found in several public and private collections, including: Metropolitan Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; MAXXI, Rome; Fundacio Caixa, Barcelona; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich Switzerland; UBS Art Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; New York Public Library, New York; Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle.

Adrian Paci teaches painting and visual arts at New Academy of Fine Arts, NABA, Milan.

He taught art at Carrara Academy of Fine Arts, Bergamo (2002-2008) and IUAV, Venice(2003-2015), and has given lectures and art workshops at various universities, academies, and art institutions around the world.