David Horvitz. Abbandonare il locale

Opening on the occasion of the twenty-eighth edition of miart, the international modern and contemporary art fair of Milan, Abbandonare il locale is the first major solo exhibition in Italy dedicated to David Horvitz and it is organized in collaboration with BiM, an ambitious urban regeneration project in the Bicocca district which is transforming an iconic building designed by Vittorio Gregotti into a cutting-edge work destination. Exceptionally set up inside a disused office, the exhibition is curated by Nicola Ricciardi, artistic director of miart, who has selected together with Horvitz over 20 works covering almost 20 years of the artists' career.

Born in Los Angeles, where he lives and works, Horvitz uses a disparity of media – from photography to performance, from artists' books to sound, from gastronomy to mail art – to examine questions of distance between places, people, and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. His works have been exhibited across the world, from the New Museum in New York City to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and today he's present in some of the most prestigious collections, from LACMA in Los Angeles to the MoMA in New York City.

Combining a site-specific approach with a performative attitude and mixing historical works with new productions and found objects, Abbandonare il locale stems from the desire of giving a tangible form to the expression no time no space, chosen as the theme and title of the 2024 edition of miart to underline the fair's aspiration to increasingly broaden its geographical and temporal boundaries. The choice of an abandoned office as exhibition venue also underlines the deep interest on the part of both the artist and the curator for liminal spaces, transitoriness, and impermanence, evident already from some of the very first works on display, like "Nostalgia" (2019) — in which photographs from Horvitz's digital archive were transformed into words before being permanently deleted — or "I imagine I am looking into the eyes of someone looking at my eyes after my death " (2020), a self-portrait in which the artist imagines the elusive future of a photograph and evokes the unknowable impact that each person has on the lives of others.

Other works try to complicate and subvert our standardized idea of time - as in the case of "A clock whose seconds are synchronized with your heartbeat" (2020), or "Evidence of time travel" (2014), for which the artist lived in Europe, regulating his life on the California time zone. One more poetic reflection on the same topic is offered by "Lullaby for a landscape (Der Mond ist aufgegangen)" (2017), an installation that crosses half of the exhibition space and which the viewer is invited to play, thus evoking the moment when one iw about to fall asleep, when linear time slowly dissolves and images and memories lose their natural order.

On the other hand, some works try to dismantle boundaries and borders, opening portals towards new dimensions — as in "For Kiyoko" (2017), in which Horvitz photographs the stars that he imagined his grandmother looked at 75 years earlier from the Japanese internment camp in Colorado where she was forcibly relocated during the Second World War, or in the installation "The Distance of a Day" (2013), in which the artist exhibits two videos made simultaneously by him and his mother in California and the Maldives, one at sunrise and one at sunset on the same day. There are also many windows that open onto the future of our planet, such as the reflections offered by "Air de LA" (2020) and "If you keep looking away there will soon be no other place to look" (2024), created specifically for this exhibition, which make the signs of the dramatic increase in frequency and intensity of climate change visible and tangible.... read the rest of the article»