LaRete Art Projects

Icaro Zorbar

ICARO ZORBAR. Performance, exhibition and workshop
Curated by Claudia Löffelholz & Federica Patti
on the occasion of roBOt Festival 2014 
MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna | Via Don Minzoni, 14, Bologna
Opening and performance 30/10/2014 7pm-9pm | exhibition 01-05/10/2014

roBOt Festival - international event dedicated to music and digital arts, born and promoted by the Shape association - Bologna and LaRete Art Projects are thrilled to announce Icaro Zorbar's exhibition and workshop at MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. The Colombian artist is a protagonist for the first edition of a new artistic residency project devoted to digital arts and electronic music - produced thanks to the support of Fondazione del Monte and the Comune di Bologna - inserted among the projects which the Comune di Bologna spreads inside the network of cities which are part of Città della Musica UNESCO - for 2014 in collaboration with the city of Bogotà (Columbia).
In the context of the 7th edition of roBOt, Zorbar was invited to carry out a residency period (September 19th - October 7th) along with a workshop (September 22nd - 27th), during which he will come into contact with the Bolognese artistic scene. Participating to the workshop are the composer and audio-video artist Caterina Barbieri, the visual artists Barbara Baroncini and Irene Fenara, and the visual and sound artist Pasquale Sorrentino. The exchange and dialogue activity guided by Icaro Zorbar will lead to the production of a collective piece exposed alongside two other installations by the Colombian artist.
MAMbo collaborates on the project, curated by Claudia Löffelholz and Federica Patti, hosting Zorbar as part of the Sandra Natali artistic residency, the workshop in the education department and the final exhibition, inaugurated with a performance by the artist on September 30th, 7 pm, in the museum's foyer.
#lostmemories, the theme of roBOt Festival 2014, is an invitation to reflect upon the concept of memory in the era of Big data. This thematic is a recurrent one in Icaro Zorbar's (Bogotà, 1977) research, explored with the help of his "assisted installations", artworks made of apparently broken and useless mechanisms and assemblages, sounds and projections for which he uses music cassettes, vintage technological music devices, often worn away by disuse and time, which require the presence of the artist to reveal their functioning and come back to life. For the opening, Zorbar will show the hidden mechanics of his "assisted installations" which animate themselves only with the performing artist's intervention, and pass on the activation, like a ritual, placing it in the audience's hands for the entire duration of the exhibition - up to October 5th.
For Zorbar these works are related to the complexity of emotions and feelings in relation among people: the romanticism evoked by these technological devices is for the artist the act of discovery of a shared nostalgia. Across his installations, composed of remote technological elements, he creates new connections, formulates conversations, facilitates encounters and separations, acts upon tensions to shine a light on the fragility of our relations, and invites us reciprocally to reflect upon the needs of others. These hybrid and surprising devices appear as suggestive residuals of another world, but instead they are assemblages of components, memories and emotions hidden in our past, which are evoked thanks to the artist's poetic universe.

LaRete Art Projects