Uprising : Ugo Schiavi

“Obedience was dull, revolt impossible, struggle hazardous”

Honore de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 1835.

“The rising is an endless gesture, ceaselessly renewed, sovereign as, perhaps, desire itself, or that drive, that 'impulse of freedom', what Sigmund Freud called Freiheitsdrang. That is why the field of uprisings is potentially infinite.”

George Didi-Huberman, Soulèvements, Essays 2016.

For his first exhibition in Turkey, Ugo Schiavi - known for his interventions in public spaces, will present a body of new sculptural works resulting from a form of activism within his practice as well as a site-specific installation.

The exhibition will oppose two types of representations of forces both enabling the artist to establish what he calls a ‘contemporary archeology’. On the one hand, the anthropomorphic force will be articulated around a body of fragmented sculptures representing people climbing on monuments during mass-movements, protests or insurrections, enabling the artist to confront two representations and deal with civil society claiming its rights, and its manifestation in the public space. In order to make these sculptures, Ugo Schiavi travels in places with recent insurrectional history and takes imprints of monuments without authorization, finding ways to avoid local authorities.

On the other hand, the artist will perform a site-specific intervention, related to the notions of territory, sampling and conservation and how nature takes over its rights in the Anthropocene era, by sampling and implementing soil from different parts of Istanbul to show how nature overcomes construction.