Kaleidoscope is an international quarterly of contemporary art and culture. Distributed worldwide on a seasonal basis, it offers a timely guide to the present (but also to the past and possible futures) with an interdisciplinary and unconventional approach.
Kaleidoscope’s initiatives include a project space, located in our headquarters in Milan and animated by a rigorous and highly selective program.
Kaleidoscope project space is hosting the first solo show in Italy dedicated to Peter Friedl (b. 1960, Oberneukirchen, Austria. Lives and works in Berlin). The show will open on September 16 at 6:30 pm and will be on view until October 16. Friedl’s work reflects on how images are produced and questions their ability to represent a historic, political and cultural event. In this investigation, carried out with a wide variety of media, from photography to non-fiction essay writing, Friedl recently introduced the use of the tableau vivant with the two videos The Children (2009) and Bilbao Song (2010) – on view among other works in the exhibition. Two situations characterized by a complex political history—Albania and the Basque countries—are emblematized through a staging based on painterly models. The persuasive beauty of these images, composed within iconographic traditions (socialist realism in one case, historic painting in the other), has an allegorical function with regard to the historical-political issues they reference. With the creation of tableaux vivants, Freidl makes explicit his interest in the events that lie behind the imagery frozen in a given representational tradition.
The exhibition of Peter Friedl’s work is part of the programming for Kaleidoscope’s project space, curated by Michele D’Aurizio and Eva Fabbris for the 2010–2011 season.