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Zaatari, Akram
Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013- HD video (colour, sound, 34’),16 mm loop (colour, silent, 80''), movie theater chair and synchronized light design. Ed. 3/7 + 3 A.P.
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- 'Letter to a Refusing Pilot' (2013) has its origins in a story the artist first heard when he was 16 years old. During the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon in 1982, a rumour circulated in Zaatari’s hometown, Saida, that an Israeli fighter pilot was supposed to bomb a target on the outskirts of the city but, aware the building was a school, refused to destroy it. Instead, as the story went, the pilot veered off course and dropped the bombs into the sea. This story of the pilot’s supposed refusal was told over the years with different explanations, as the artist’s own father was the director of the school for twenty years. As Zaatari came to uncover decades later, the story was in fact not a rumour: the pilot was real. In 'Letter to a Refusing Pilot', first presented in the Lebanese Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennial in 2013, he explores this complex history, weaving personal memory with recent political history, through an installation that places a 45-minute video and a looping 16 mm film, in dialogue within an immersive environment. Much of the work was filmed in the neighbourhood around the school, and incorporates a variety of images, photographs, and drawings, as well as personal documents, to tell the story of the pilot, Hagai Tamir, from the perspective of a teenage boy. The title of the work quotes Albert Camus’s four-part epistolary essay ‘Letters to a German Friend’, revisiting Camus’s plea: ‘I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice’.
Zorio, Gilberto
Gilberto Zorio (Andorno Micca, Itália, 1944)Colonna, 1967- Column, 1967
- Fibre cement, rubber
- 285 x 30 x 30 cm
- Coll. of the artist, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 1999
- 'Colonna'[Column] is inspired by the building methods and materials that, as a child, Gilberto Zorio would find on the sites of his father’s construction company. The vertical cement column that comprises the work is supported by black rubber inner tubes, destabilizing the ideas of security and solidity that are usually associated with architecture. Through a critical and ironic citation of classical architecture, in which columns are indispensable, Zorio’s sculpture seems to celebrate precariousness. The work directly explores the tensions and flows of energies and forces that exist in the physical world, such as gravity, but it can also be seen, in its careful choice of materials and attention to composition, as an expression of the small alterations that transform everyday objects into art. Gilberto Zorio is an artist linked to the Italian arte povera movement that, in the mid-1960s, favoured process over end results in art making, and promoted the use of humble, unstable and perishable materials. Alcohol, gases such as helium and hydrogen, terracotta, and pieces of rubber are some of the materials used by Zorio to emphasize such processes as evaporation, crystallization, oxidation and elasticity. At the same time these materials stimulate all the senses to the perception of his works. His approach to natural transformations shows an implicit interest in the passage of a physical state to another within a certain timeframe.
Gilberto Zorio (Andorno Micca, Itália, 1944)Piombi, 1968- Leads, 1968
- Lead plate, copper sulphate, chloric acid, rope
- 95 x 250 x 160 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1998
- Partly lying on the floor, partly propped against the wall, two lead plates have been converted into shallow basins. The two plates remain in contact on top and fold one over the other. The lower part of each plate serves as a recipient into which chemical solutions have been poured: copper sulphate (blue solution) into one, chloric acid (green solution) into the other. The tips of a copper rod bent into an arch dips into each of them. The installation works as a galvanic battery and the chemical reactions gradually transfigure the sculpture: at one end the copper sulphate forms blue crystals; at the other the chloric acid generates green crystals. Lead also reacts, forming white crystals. In 'Piombi' [Leads] Zorio reveals his profound interest in transformation and the energy potential of elements. In making the work, Zorio was not moved by scientific purpose, but rather interested in bringing out the poetic dimension of material an physical processes, namely the chromatic alterations that result, in his own words, in ‘dream colours’, as well as in the invincible power, or even the threatening violence, of natural phenomena. Zorio’s predilection for lead is not an accident. Lead was also the alchemists’ material of choice. The ancestral dimension of lead, one of the first metals to have been worked by man, is highly relevant to the artist. Zorio’s first solo exhibition in Turin in 1967 led Germano Celant to associate him with arte povera. Movement, energy and transformation through a chain of processes cross the whole of Zorio’s oeuvre, which is also characterized by an enormous diversity of materials. The combination and interaction of the various elements unleash chemical reactions, processes of mutation and releases energy with visual results.
Gilberto Zorio (Andorno Micca, Itália, 1944)La canoa di Porto, 1990- The Porto Canoe, 1990
- Wood covered in Polyester resin, iron tubes, copper tubes, PVC cone, fluorescent pigment, compressor, timer, sound
- 271 x 1090 x 210 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1991
- Gilberto Zorio created 'La canoa di Porto' [The Porto Canoe] for his exhibition at the Serralves Villa in 1990. Despite its large dimensions and rough character, the sculpture, built through a process of assemblage, is surprisingly light in appearance. It is for a large part made up of recycled units (canoe, tubes, PVC cone) kept in their original form rather than subjected to polishing, welding or any other form of disguise (except for the canoe itself, that was covered in polyester resin), the whole resembling a giant mobile projected in space. The sounds of a whistle and gurgling water seem to confer to it an animate nature. This performative character is common to Zorio’s sculptures, especially those created from 1990 onwards: they move, vibrate, oscillate, emit sounds.The canoe is a recurring element in Zorio’s work, for its elementary and ancestral character, the perfection of its form, worked on for centuries, and its strong symbolic charge as a means of projection through space and time. 'La canoa di Porto' does not breach and pierce the water as it cuts through the waves: crossing the elements of nature, from navigation in water, it ascends to navigation in the air. A key figure of arte povera, Gilberto Zorio shares with other artists in the movement the exploration of energy and the transformation of matter. His almost alchemical use of materials and the ingenious sound and visual effects it delivers are distinguishing features of his work.
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