STATES OF STATELESSNESS
MSURS | The Museum of Contemporary Art of Republic of Srpska, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Exhibition dates: 13/06 – 12/07 |Opening: Thursday, June 13th, 7 p.m
Under the support and joint collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska, the Embassy of Italy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Italian Businesses Association in Bosnia and Herzegovina (AIIBH); Niccolò Masini exhibition States of Statelessness combines a series of works articulated in a path where territories, statuses and recollections are manifested through an articulated journey of place-making experimentations. The works on display take shape in the interaction of multiple expressive languages, borders, and/or political displacements, raising questions concerning individual and collective responses to the complex realities imposed by different forms of geographical appurtenances. In these terms, States of Statelessness suggest spatial investigations and analytical discourse languages beyond their mere territorial reference, tracing those mobile limits that consolidate confined communities’ statuses of “imagined” de-territorialization processes through various forms of written-unwritten knowledge.
Born as an echo of Masini’s latest artistic and methodological practices, the exhibition borrows its title from the 4th Errant Journal’s “States of Statelessness”; the issue focused on the harmful fiction of the nation-state and celebrates alternative forms of solidarity, community-building, and belonging that are disconnected from or even antagonistic to established forms of governance and in which marginalized perspectives can function as alternatives manifestations of power and resistance. Expanding upon Errant Journal’s conceptual framework, the exhibition articulates the various dispositions in which the imaginary nature of the nation-state might be subjected to alternative “statuses” of place-making conditions, conceiving borders and identity from a new materialist perspective, in which hybrid conditions of displacement, territorialization, deterritorialization processes are iteratively reconfigured through the world’s ongoing intra-activity.
As an artist, filmmaker, and researcher, Niccolò Masini can be placed at the intersection of narrative and craft, but also poetry and anthropology. His work seeks to provide a vehicle for observing tangible and intangible migratory processes, mappings, and traces in relation to borders and colonization, together with the economic and political forces that have imposed precarious labor conditions and attenuated “other” histories. This series of multidisciplinary approaches function as a composition of hybrid practices, suggesting a multifocal discourse attentive to and aware of the symbolism implied in its formalization, suggesting to retrace the path produced in rediscovering the point, the place of straying. In as much as memory, the narratives describing the contours of the realities in which we might find ourselves interacting play a crucial role in forming the multilayered trama compelling the various states of territorial identity, beyond time, space, and inheritances. While individual cognitive experiences may not change the world alone, their collective articulation can trigger alternative shifts if properly articulated.
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