CANTASTORIA
UTAH MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SALT LAKE CITY, UT
JUNE 5 - SEPTEMBER 15, 2012
Ignasi Aballi, Aram Bartholl, Adam Bateman, Beehive Design Collective, Aleksandra Domanovic, Omer Fast, Jakup Ferri, Janos Fodor, Carey Ann Francis, Rainer Ganahl, Andy Graydon, Pablo Helguera, Bob Moss, Lucia Nimcova, Lisa Oppenheim, REP Group, Ignacio Uriarte
Situated between Homer, Twitter, and the singing telegram, Cantastoria is an exploration of how contemporary artists communicate histories and cultures using languages, messengers, and witnesses as creative material. This exhibition explores the notion of the Cantastoria as a metaphor across cultures and specifically within contemporary art.
Historically, Cantastoria, which means “history singer” or “sung story” in Italian, were prominent in preliterate culture as vehicles for transmitting news, heritage, and history. Their information was conveyed theatrically in a town square through song and pictograms.
This exhibition’s theme navigates the basic quest for kinship between peoples and the methods by which we hold on to our histories. It explores the museum’s primary function as a storyteller of culture while the artworks poetically decode our diaristic instincts and desires.
Revisiting conventional formats of history painting and narrative-driven compositions, Cantastoria presents artworks that communicate information through languages, song, storytelling, and lyricism. It sources origins and relationships with news media while touching on languages born out of cultural specificities of Utah itself or contemporary activism onto parallel and bygone eras such as the former USSR. Other artists reconnect us with dead and dying languages that are no longer understood as well as putting us in contact with those languages beyond our Earth. It is a way to look at how we transmit information, reminisce about languages of communication that are lost and obsolete, while exploring new pathways of connection that are emerging around us.
Photo credit : Morganne Wakefield
