MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo

Armin Linke

21 Oct - 14 Nov 2010

ARMIN LINKE
Il Corpo dello Stato
curated by Luigia Lonardelli
21 October - 14 November 2010

The Private Office of the President of the Republic, the Press Room of the Prime Minister’s Office, the Constitutional Court, the Senate of the Republic, the Chamber of Deputies, the Vaults of the Banca d’Italia, the offices of the ARI management, the Mosque and the Synagogue in Rome: just some of the places featured in the project Armin Linke Il Corpo dello Stato. The 28 prints on show, part of the museum’s collection, are exhibited here for the first time.

The photos examine power through the places in which it is exercised, the “control rooms” to which very few of us have access: a story composed of conceptual rarefactions and voids in which the images, dialoguing with one another, generate a political and aesthetic reflection on modern western democracy.
Inspired by the allure of the ceremony of the investiture of the bishops in the Vatican, il Corpo dello Stato project began in 2002 as an analysis of the ritual and the perception of strongly symbolic places.
The second phase of the project began in 2006 when the artist, with the support of MAXXI Arte, undertook a campaign to map the places in which religious and political power is exercised: spaces in which decisions are taken and ceremonies performed, analysed in their ancient use and current function.

Il Corpo dello Stato proposes a reflection on the ephemeral confine between public and private, on the strength of mediatic images, on the fragile distinctions between televisual fiction and reality.
 

Tags: Armin Linke