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Extracurricular activity Eng

Extracurricular Activity

Matteo Attruia, Lorenza Boisi, Stefano Calligaro, Juan Carlos Ceci, Giallo Concialdi, Nebojša Despotović, Emilio Fantin, Luca Francesconi, Paolo Gonzato, Sabina Grasso, Alban Hajdinaj, Bruno Kladar, Kensuke Koike, Federico Maddalozzo, Pietro Mele, Valentina Miorandi, Nicola Ruben Montini, Giovanni Morbin, Ivan Moudov, Nicola Nunziata, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mark Požlep, Ornaghi-Prestinari, Laura Santamaria, Anna Scalfi, Michele Spanghero, Eugenia Vanni, Devis Venturelli, Asllan Zeneli

Padua (I), Superfluo
January 2012

Artist life
Daniele Capra




Extracurricular Activity explores the aspects most cheekily personal, intimate and contradictory of making art thanks to thirty artists who chose, analyzed, and reported a portion of their individual lives, or showed – with a new work – an unknown side of their research.

The show collects the works of different artists who liked the idea of showing what is generally far from the eyes of the spectators. Each artist is asked to bring personally his objects/works or choose with the organizers another way to ship them (small works are welcome).
The jobs that will be set up with the utmost care, rejecting the icy lonely place, and trying instead to weave visual relationships, conceptual, synesthetic with the work of colleagues.

What do we ask the artists living in our days? Images, concepts or emotions? Provocations for the masses, or sharp actions for intellectual elites? Works, relics or evidence?
The philosopher Agamben judged contemporary “the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him”. To be an artist means accept that the attempts to turn the lights on can fail and nobody around notices the efforts. So the artist is a person who works for the innate vocation to do something that can withstand time, aware that every time something is showed (in an exhibition, in a discussion with colleagues, etc.) there is an act of exhibitionism. The artist is like a boxer showing off his/her muscles and the scars of fights he/she had: this is what the art world wants.

The main purpose of the exhibition Extracurricular Activity is asking the artists to relax them and take it easy, because there are not expectations: the artists are free not to show what usually art world wants (i.e. piece of art), but those works and objects that describe their private life as an artist (like books, music, picture, etc.).
The concept of the exhibition is asking artists to show something that is far from their professional activity. So we ask an activity that is extracurricular, explaining the audience that be an artist in not only a job by a never ending state of mind (Extracurricular Activity is a series of works by Mike Kelley based on the activities performed in high school). Extracurricular Activity is a show in which we can take part personally, and the visual arts are not the main content, but the container, similar to the happening of Fluxus.