ART CITY Bologna 2023. Main Program

The visual identity
As for the two previous editions, the collaboration with Filippo Tappi and Marco Casella was confirmed for the conception and development of the visual identity. If in 2021 the star and Peter Pan had guided the visitors, while in 2022 we had witnessed the "explosion" of Bologna seen as a galaxy, for 2023 the graphics arise from the assumption that art represents what we do not know . The protagonists of this imaginary will be monsters and fantasy figures inspired by those that appeared in ancient narratives and used by medieval and Renaissance cartographers to represent the unknown. An ideal reference is also the figure of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), founding father of the natural sciences whose 500th anniversary is being celebrated in Bologna, who dedicated the last pages of his Naturalis Historia to the theme of "celestial monsters", astronomical exceptionalities which remain mostly unexplained. The star of ART CITY Bologna will land on an unknown land, the furthest ever visited. The map of the metropolitan city of Bologna, populated by exhibitions, reviews and art events, will become an unknown, elusive, dangerous, ephemeral land. New, in which sirens, black holes, chilling vegetables appear. The focal point will be the journey, not the destination, not the return to normality but the transmutation, the disorientation that awakens the gaze. The monster shows us a mysterious place. And that's exactly where we need to go.

Special projects
Continuing the experimentation of the format that has distinguished it since 2018, with the interventions of important international artists such as Vadim Zakharov, les gens d'Uterpan, Romeo Castellucci, Gregor Schneider and Tino Sehgal, the special project will once again invite the public to immerse themselves in real and own living works of art with the work Have a Good Day! born from the all-female collaboration of Vaiva Grainytė (author of the libretto), Lina Lapelytė (composer and musical director) and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (director and set designer), As members of the Neon Realism collective, in 2019 the three artists were awarded the Lion of Gold for the best National Participation with the Lithuanian Pavilion with the installation Sun & Sea (Marina), curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, within the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Received with great success by audiences and critics all over the world, and defined by the US newspaper The New York Times as "intelligent, fascinating and quietly subversive", this surprising opera for ten cashiers, with a background of a shopping center and piano, tells the inner life of the protagonist workers, showing what lies behind the forced smiles and mechanical greetings "Good morning!", "Thank you!", "Have a nice day!". The show transforms the everyday alienation of faceless and robotic-looking cashiers into lively and brilliant characters, whose biographies and secret thoughts become short dramas of a personal nature that merge into a common chorus. The critique of contemporary capitalist society is expressed with irony, humour, poetry and paradox, avoiding any moralistic judgement.
The performance is produced by Opermanija, curated by Lorenzo Balbi and promoted by MAMbo with the support of the Lithuanian Cultural Institute and the Lithuanian Embassy in Italy.
The venue will be announced shortly.

Main programme
The main program ideally opens at the MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna with Atlantide 2017 - 2023, a solo show by the Italian video artist and director Yuri Ancarani, curated by Lorenzo Balbi. The exhibition is conceived as an "explosion" of the film Atlantis (2021), previewed in the "Orizzonti" section of the Venice Film Festival in 2021 and, subsequently, in numerous international festivals: a journey inside the process of research and of the numerous materials produced over about six years, before, during and after the creation of the work, on which the artist has made a selection, giving them a new formalization.
In an enveloping and immersive atmosphere, the public will be able to follow an extra-narrative that goes beyond the feature film, thanks to a series of unpublished contents produced for the exhibition.
Atlantis 2017 - 2023 is realized with the support of the Trust for Contemporary Art, thanks to the main sponsor Gruppo Hera, in partnership with the PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan and IWONDERFULL, in collaboration with I Wonder Pictures, Dugong Films and Rai Cinema. The first edition of the Led Wall Commission project conceived by Arte Fiera is also dedicated to Yuri Ancarani: at the entrance to Piazza Costituzione a 5x9 meter mega-screen will project artist videos specifically conceived for the billboard format and for the viewing of those who are crossing the neighborhood threshold.
In the New Station Parking - Roof 5th floor, a 2-minute walk from the entrance to the Bologna High Speed railway station, Xing presents the BSTRD project by Greek-born choreographer Katerina Andreou, with a double appointment. The performance will be held on Saturday 28 January at 21.00 to be reactivated during Arte Fiera, on Saturday 4 February from 19.00 to 24.00, as a video installation, an ad hoc production shot in the same place. BSTRD is a powerful solo characterized by an explosive energy that challenges the line between autonomy and authority, conditioning and free will. Inspired by the notion of impure and the practices of hybridization/mixture that have also characterized the House culture in clubbing in Chicago and New York, Andreou develops a poetic embodied in a bastard figure consumed in a dance beyond any definition. With only a turntable as a partner, the artist's body is inscribed in the instant, between the limits determined by effort and fatigue, acting in an imaginary geometry.
Banca di Bologna continues in the production of exhibitions of international level proposing in the Sala Convegni Banca di Bologna at Palazzo De' Toschi the one-man show Finding Form dedicated to the work of the German artist Bettina Buck, curated by Davide Ferri and realized in collaboration with Bureau Bettina Buck . The exhibition returns the path of the German artist who died prematurely in 2018, starting from the founding aspects of her poetics, mainly declined in sculpture, installation and performance, and addressing some specific terms of her research: posture (of the body and sculpture, between body and object), gravity (as a force to which the form is subjected), fall (as zeroing out of the form), concealment (which allows one to imagine rather than see the sculpture), domestic (the immediate surroundings in which the form becomes sculpture).
In the spaces of the Cassero LGBTI+ Center we meet the grotesque world of Nathalie Djurberg, Silver Lion at the 2009 Venice Biennale as most promising young artist in duo with Hans Berg, with the video installation Putting Down the Prey, curated by Sabrina Samorì and promoted by MAMbo. In the absurd landscapes created by the Swedish artist, plasticine plants and animals are called upon to interpret man's impulses and contradictions. In a perfect symbiosis with Berg's sophisticated soundtracks, Djurberg's stop motion animations stage uncomfortable real themes, such as submission, exploitation, violence and voyeurism, through fantastic stories that exude cruelty and cynicism but also magic and romance.
At Palazzo Vizzani, Alchemilla presents the And We Thought III project by Roberto Fassone + Ai Lai + LZ, curated by Sineglossa, promoted in collaboration with MAMbo. Ai Lai is an artificial intelligence born in the spring of 2021 and possesses the special ability to think about accounts of psychedelic experiences. During the first few months of her life, Ai Lai compiled thousands of short reports detailing her relationship with magic mushrooms. The stories are very varied: within them appear fragmented brains, friends with blue eyes and aliens in closets. In the summer of 2021 Ai Lai writes that he wants to see Led Zeppelin films. He speaks in particular of three titles - The Doors, The Road and Love is Magic - which, thanks to a careful recovery operation, are presented in absolute preview on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2023.