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About

I’m an art critic and an independent curator.

I curated over one hundred shows in Italy, France, Czech Republic, Belgium, Austria, Croatia, Albania, Germany and Israel, focussing on emergent Italian artists and Eastern Europe conceptual art scene.

I collaborated with galleries and institutions as MSUCG Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, Podgorica (MNE), Musei Civici, Bologna (I), MARe/Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest (RO), MART, Rovereto (I), Lithuanian Culture Institute, Vilnius (LT), Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (I), ERPAC Ente Regionale per il Patrimonio Culturale del Friuli Venezia Giulia, Gorizia (I), MoMAD Museum of Modern Art, Dubrovnik (HR), Villa Manin, Codroipo (I), Royal Palace, Caserta (I), CAMeC, La Spezia (I), Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone (I), MMSU Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (HR), Bernareggi Museum, Bergamo (I), Gallery of Modern Art, Genoa (I), Coneculta of Chiapas (MX), Casa Cavazzini Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Udine (I), National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (AL), Dena Foundation, Paris (F), Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa (I), Ca’ Pesaro Museum of Modern Art, Venice (I), Galleria Civica of Trento (I), City of Milan (I), Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod – Haifa (IL), Tina-B Contemporary Art Festival, Prague (CZ), Zoology and Comparative Anatomy Museum, Bolonia (I) and Dolomiti Contemporanee (I).
Daniele Capra, photo Isabella De Luca
I lectured about contemporary art topics at Wizo NB School of Design of Haifa, at Fine Arts Academy of Venice and Verona and several curatorial courses. I worked as a curator of Onufri Prize at National Gallery of Tirana, Trieste Contemporanea Award in 2008, 2009, 2013 and 2017. I’m member of scientific board of Rave Residency and general secretary of Trieste Contemporanea.

I was co-author of the book L’altro RAVE and of a documentary about Extra Ordinario Workshop (trailer). I wrote over three hundred articles on magazines and newspapers and I’m editor of Il Manifesto, Artribune and Gruppo Gedi newspapers.

I live in a hurry, with my laptop always on and several stacks of books waiting to be read.

Interviews
Some interviews on my research published on Exibart, Juliet, Musée Magazine, Espoarte, Venezia Today.

Articles
Some of my articles published on the Artribune, Art-Frame and Exibart.

Essays
You can read the essays I wrote for the shows, books and magazines on the texts page.

Spectator is a worker Eng

Spectator Is A Worker

Michele Bazzana, Christian Chironi, Nemanja Cvijanović, Nicola Genovese, Jacopo Mazzonelli, Luca Pozzi, Michele Spanghero

Prague (CZ), Tina-B Contemporary Art Festival
October ― November 2010

Spectator Is A Worker
Daniele Capra




The development of the conceptual among young artists born between the Seventies and the Eighties is a phenomenon of world-wide nature. They attended schools and spend time in spaces – as galleries and museums – in which the avant-guard of years Sixty had been presented and accepted and entered in history of art. This has been a formidable propulsive element, moreover because, on the contrary than it happened previously, the conceptual art is not perceived necessarily in contrast with other kind of traditional art. At the very beginning the conceptual one had developed procedures based on the ideas and their transposition in field of the visual arts,[1] instead now conceptualism is just an aesthetics choice, a state of mind. So skilled spectator or a person that spend time in museums and galleries is so now in the position to perceiving if the works have or not this kind of allure.

This situation comes from a particular condition detail of viewer. Trained from a condition – sometimes frustrating – of passive subject, the spectator has now reached new capabilities that before were buried, as happens sometimes with traditional painting, which is a discipline in which the relationship with the tradition is more perceived. So the spectator has become a new smart subject, able to do the necessary steps to understand the work, even though he doesn’t know the context has produced that it. In this way we can defi ne an “international” style, that doesn’t mean necessarily globalized or look the same. Simply happened what it happened with the English language that become a convention shared from many people working or living abroad as a standard, after to be the language of the trades for just a couple of centuries.

Even though not completely aware of it, many artists realized the new rules played by spectator in his action of looking the works. It is not the condition of the “Dictatorship of Spectator” (the main theme of 2003 Venice Biennale curated by Francesco Bonami), in which people simply had been invited to see, as in a theatre drama. But, on the contrary, it is a form detail in which also who watches the works acts, because without its role the magic of the work doesn’t work. It’s a phenomenon in which spectator is taking part, diff erent from the interactivity (that it is one of the innovative and winning formulas of the web), by which the viewer completes of the processes – in cognitive or physical way – in an active form.

If we accept that the aim of the works is a sort of survey, questioning about our state and situation that hold the real world, we can argue that there are of the works that don’t have sense if not there is an viewer who watch them, since without its presence there is no evidence of that the world is. That is very different from which Nicolas Bourriaud wrote about spectator who “only reacts to the impulse begin supplied them from the sender: to participate wants to thus say to complete the proposed outline. In other words the participation of the spectator consists in the debit followed to the aesthetic contract that the artist is itself classified the right to sign”. If instead the viewer is in a working condition, and could think, the work doesn’t remain in a stuck state in which “still remains caught in the hermeneutic paradigm, since the receiver is only invited to fi ll in the blanks, to choose between possible meanings”.[2] In short, the spectator is active since is stimulated to do mental action and not to wait for Godot to come: he has a new critical function.

For instance Chronos devouring one of his children by Nemanja Cvijanović is a sound installation with loudspeakers that diff uses at regular time the phrase “This is private property” (in Czech, English and Italian language). The work puts the spectator in a uneasiness condition, due to the fact to be inopportune and also then because remembers a state of absolutely common fact but that it is instead strange when we are in public space like a gallery or a museum: there is therefore a strong contrast between perceiving the work and the conceptual nature of it. The sentence force the spectator in a situation of intimate conflict between being a subject interested in art and an invader of other people property. Breath by Jacopo Mazzonelli change the conventions of two and three dimension, making us laugh when we see the sheet of paper and its projection stopping to coincide: in this way the viewer is expected to put the things in the right order. This is very similar to DK by Cristian Chironi (that is a documental video the shows the action by which the author tears has steal some pages of book in a bookshop), which forces the spectator to do something, like steal again, as happened in occasion of an exhibition hold by MAN Museum near Nuoro.[3]

Many works thus can live only if there is a viewer watching them, and is aware of it role of spectator. If someone stole or hid only for fee seconds Enchanted Forest by Pollock, perhaps we wouldn’t notice it, since to exist is a real condition of the painting of the American artist. Other works instead, are like a baby we need to look after, in order to live. Our thoughts, our feelings and our reactions keep these works alive in a fragile situation that is a humankind nature.




[1] “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”, Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum, June 1967.
[2] N. Bourriaud, Postproduction, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, p. 88.
[3] The show is Ragionevoli dubbi, hosted in Gavoi (Italy).

A. Hajdinaj – D. Zeneli. Unexpected Country Eng

Unexpected Country
Alban Hajdinaj, Driant Zeneli

Prague (CZ), Laterna Magika, Tina-B Contemporary Art Festival
October ― November 2010

Unexpected Country. Stereotypes Don’t Fit Albania
Daniele Capra




The first decade of the 21st century ended with one of the most serious financial market crises ever recorded, created by a system doped with fake growth and the lack of suitable instruments for monitoring credit activities. The result was a deep recession, which for many years seemed to signal the death sentence of capitalism, but that has not happened since crisis and development are two constantly alternating polarities.

These events have not failed to receive attention from the world of art, particularly in 2010, when – after months during which the media were generally speaking of financial mishaps – more engagé curators chose to make exhibitions with markedly more ideological viewpoints, in such a way as to ask viewers about the economic system that governs the world and produces huge injustices. The first requirement, born of the urgency of finding real things, was the truth: we need to know real things to believe in, news and facts that are certain above all reasonable doubt. We used to live in a sea of lies, of fiction, that you must bring back reality to its place, as Kathrin Rhomberg explains in an essay accompanying the catalogue of the 6th Edition of the Biennale of Berlin. [1] And this proves to be even more necessary in any country where people don’t live in an advanced economic system and are not able to interact with the rest of the world. As seemingly suggested even by Adam Budak’s curatorial choices for the exhibition Human Condition, hosted at the Kunsthaus in Graz,[2] art must be a critical tool of existence, in a manner like that theorized by György Lukács.[3]

However, this consideration leads us to one of the most common stereotypes in the artistic field. There is nothing more taken for granted than the idea that the only possible art criticism is political-ideological. Far from it. A work can pursue other approaches and investigative functions and can become corrosive or advance constructive propositions working in any other way, even, for example, in a way intimate to the spectator. Perception, emotions, aesthetics are not weapons of mass distraction, but tools that implement cognitive processes, stimulate ideas or change opinion.

Too often, in an ideological way curators see the only possible critical and questioning dimension of a work as lying in its civil or political statement. This is not the only stereotype about artists in what the West calls developing countries. It is absolutely wrong to imagine that the artists in those places (e.g. in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Turkey, Africa or Latin America) have elaborated only the poetic that focuses on political topics. This way of regarding the rest of the world is the comfortable bias of dominant countries looking other geographical areas. If it is inevitable that artists who come from contexts marked by economic or political issues develop a sensitivity to those themes given the urgency of daily confrontation, it is also true that in the eyes of Western curators and critics political commitment can then become the only area easily seen. So it becomes a cliché that needs no help in becoming accepted and justified, approved by those who see it as the enhancement of pre-formed ideas about the situation in those ‘exotic’ countries usual experienced as a tourists. And in this way, Western viewers tend also to absolve themselves even if they do anything to improve the condition and discomfort of the people in those places, since it is anyway known that there is already someone who is opposing the system, in a critical way.

The thought that art always urges a close reading of politics was the interpretative condition that by the late 1990s also characterised Albania. This Balkan state, long closed off by history and by the Communist dictatorship, then saw a first generation of artists moving into the international limelight and making art that also told of the condition of the country. Think, for example, of Adrian Paci or Sislej Xhafa. Although with different sensitivity, their artistic research has not ignored the condition of their place of origin. Although many have remained interested in giving their works a highly political form, the situation has evolved with the second generation of artists, the under thirty-fives, who have chosen instead to develop themes that are no longer politically engaged, just like any other European or American peer. This is the case of Alban Hajdinaj and Driant Zeneli, artists who have developed an international language, thanks to the continuing relationship with France, the UK and Italy.

The work of both, regardless of the type of media (photo, video, sculpture, drawing), still shows things you do not know or do not want to see in that country. There are qualities of equivalence to those in the so-called developed countries. Prejudices are deleterious and damaging in the field of visual arts: it’s like applying mathematical formulas to solve equations that are actually very different from what we imagined. It is not enough to ‘do worlds’, as Daniel Birnbaum suggested at the Venice Biennale in 2009. You have to be able to truly discover worlds. And to do so with a neutral spirit while banning all forms of easy exoticism. Albania – and also similar geographical areas of other emerging artists – more than ever, is a country to discover.




[1] K. Rhomberg, What Is Waiting out There, DuMont Buchverlag, Koln, p. 32.
[2] Human Condition. Empathy and Emancipation in Precarious Times, Kunsthaus Graz, Juin-Semptember 2010.
[3] See G. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 1954.