Press release
Rainer Ganahls artistic practice addresses questions concerning knowledge production and educational politics. What to teach, what to learn, what to read, what to discuss with whom? Starting in the early 1990s, the artist has been studying foreign languages (mostly languages that are not on the European curriculum like Russian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Modern Greek etc.), photographing and interviewing intellectuals (Seminar/Lecture series and others), conducting oral history projects (Language of Emigration series and others) and holding Reading Seminars as part of his art projects.
For his project at Base Rainer Ganahl is engaging with a one week reading project
entitled Leggere Antonio Gramsci Reading Antonio Gramsci.
As he has done with a previous project on Italian language acquisition with
the texts of Piero Passolini at Gallery Massimo de Carlo, 1997, the artist tries
to improve his rather fluent knowledge of Italian by reading and discussing
Antonia Gramsci with a group of students. Ganahl is in particular interested
in Gramscis ideas on intellectuals and their position and function in
political struggle in a modern and democratic world. Gramsci was one of the
first philosophers interested in popular culture and their organic intellectuals
independent of universities, state institutions and official cultural recognitions.
Gramsci saw in the deprived economic regions of Italy a force for political
and cultural change. Today, regional, economical, political and cultural disparities
and injustices have made the world become a very dangerous place. Arrogance,
greed, technological superiority and military might by the super-powerful have
instigated aggressive reactions by groups of people associated with poverty,
exploitation and cultural and religious otherness that are now threatening in
one or another way the safety of everybody around the globe, causing in return
reactions that are incomprehensively threatening and dangerous to world piece
and security.
The artist will exhibit at Base a series of photographs and project a film made
with materials from the reading seminar. He will also include some of the works
resulting from his new work in progress entitled My first 500 hours basic
Arabic
Some of the works can also be seen in the next
door casa del popolo, a community center for the Italian ex-communist
party that is today functioning as a bar for old people, unemployed and young
kids playing with video games. Seven small works Reading Antonio
Gramsci, (a founding member of the Italian communist party) are
hanging next to the dusty library in one of the corridors without disturbing
the given aesthetic of this legendary place.
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