Galleria Bianconi is pleased to announce IT’S YOUR TURN, opening on February 28th and running until May 25th, 2013. The exhibition, curated by Julia Draganović and Claudia Löffelholz, offers a path through the works of Susanne Bosch (Wesel, 1967) who defines herself as an artist who “works predominantly with and in public”, Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971), a polyhedral artist who expresses himself with a wide range of media, and who is also an educator and Icaro Zorbar (Bogotá, 1977), an animator of “assisted installations”.
On the opening evening - on the 28th of February, 6.00 – 9.00 p.m. - the exhibition will be combined with a series of performances by Pablo Helguera and Icaro Zorbar, relating to the art works on display, which show the different approaches of the two artists to the audience.

IT’S YOUR TURN is the 5th stage of “Click or Clash? Strategies of collaboration”, a project curated by Julia Draganović and promoted by Galleria Bianconi - Milan in collaboration with LaRete Art Projects. The project has been unfolding since more than a year as an open debate about the practices of collaboration in contemporary art and beyond, which connects every single exhibition. IT'S YOUR TURN is the audience’s opportunity: the question is focused on the meaning of the public and its role in the art work – as the object of the research, or as a part of the relationship, or the spectator of the performance, or rather the essential actor of the interaction. The three international artists are invited to compare their different approaches and the different meanings which they confer to this aspect.

Susanne Bosch works in the public space like in a creative theatre to face political, social and economic issues. Her research starts from the analysis of questions coming from real situations, and then develops into different artistic expressions based on the subject. In this case, the artist will show a series of drawins, wall paintings and light boxes related to her most recent field of interest: the communities which apply social and economic sustainable models as alternatives to the mainstream, to pursue, as a selection of answers to the contradictions of capitalism and globalization. After a direct relationship with these communities, the artist submits to the audience the results of her site-specific inquiry. The three projects selected for this exhibit are: the experience of The Arab Development Society, an experimental model of school and rural business in Palestine, strategies to reduce the consumption of the Freegans community in New York, and the activity of Brooklyn Grange, a biological farm on the rooftops of New York.

Pablo Helguera, combining his artistic and educational research – as Director of Adult and Academic Programs in the Department of Education at MoMA – works with “scores” of previous performances which he will re-enact during the opening. An echo of the concept of the opera aperta by Umberto Eco is inherent to his work: the art work not only cannot exist without an audience, but it needs to be interpreted to become an installation, a sculpture, photography, a drawing, an action in the public space or a performance. In this case, Pablo Helguera presents a series of art works related to performances focused on the inquiry into human behaviour within the art world. The artist himself will activate them during the opening of the exhibit, and then pass the action to the audience with whom he will set real “life time” performative relationships. Among his actions there will be the re-enactment of the work The Seven Bridges of Königsberg (2008) which, quoting the mathematic enigma, consists of 49 tarot like cards, which the artist has produced to interpret the position of the audience in the art system.

Icaro Zorbar will bring and perform with his “assisted installations”: apparently broken and useless devices which come alive with the artist’s performative action. There are cassette tapes, music boxes and other mechanical objects, often worn out by time, which require the presence of the artist to reveal their function and to come to life. For Zorbar, these works are related to the complexity of emotions and feelings among people: these technological devices recall a romanticism as a revelation of a shared nostalgia. Through these devices, Zorbar creates new connections, makes conversations, eases meetings and separations. He works on tensions to enlighten the strength and weakness of our relationships and invites us to give thought to the need of others.