Lantern With No Walls, Fondazione In Between Art Film, December 13, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Fondazione In Between Art Film presents the group show Lantern With No Walls, an exhibition event conceived in response to the evocative landscape of the Bernese Alps that surround the town of Gstaad in Switzerland.

For the first time, the Fondazione is showcasing a selection of works from its own collection, which is focused exclusively on the numerous expressions of the moving image in the field of contemporary art, including more than 130 artist’s films, video installations and single-channel works.

Through the selection of six video works by international artists including Saodat Ismailova (1981, Uzbekistan), Masbedo (Nicolò Massazza, 1973 and Iacopo Bedogni, 1970, Italy), Adrian Paci (1969, Albania), Thao Nguyen Phan (1987, Vietnam), Janis Rafa (1984, Greece), and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (1977, Spain), the exhibition offers a significant insight into the dynamics underpinning the collection owned by the Fondazione, which arose out of the desire on the part of its founder and president Beatrice Bulgari to support artists, scholars and institutions committed to exploring the expressive potential of moving images and the intersections between different artistic disciplines. The six works are placed in dialogue with each other against the backdrop designed by the interdisciplinary studio 2050+, founded by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli.

At the center of the narrative of each work on view is the idea or the image of a landscape––be it a fragment of a mountain, of countryside, of a river or a forest––inhabited by symbolic or earthly life forms, human and non-human, existing in the present day or emerging from the horizons of history. In each work, the real or imaginary landscape is traversed, explored, contemplated and transcended by the main characters in a sequence of scenarios within which the act of walking and that of existing in space give rise to metaphors on time, the human impact on the environment, the reverberation of the past in the present, and the immensity of the forms of life.

We find real landscapes that mutate into existential scenarios: from the rocky expanses of Uzbekistan in the work of Saodat Ismailova, to the frozen wastes of Iceland in the Masbedo video; from the Albanian mountain road in the two-channel video installation by Adrian Paci, to the banks of the Mekong River in the film by Thao Nguyen Phan. In other works, nature seems to be a human construction, originating from a staging, as in the Janis Rafa video, or from a product of technology, as in Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s computer-generated animation.

Lantern With No Walls serves as a “panorama of panoramas,” a mosaic of landscapes and scenarios that blend into each other and imply a continuous osmosis between past and present, human and non-human, individual existence and collective existence. The symbolic form of the lantern evokes the need for a light source that allows us to traverse both the landscape and life itself, even when the clouds seem to be gathering on the horizon.

Beatrice Bulgari, founder and president of Fondazione In Between Art Film, states: “This new exhibition by the Fondazione brings together works by artists whom I admire and who continue to inspire me, in a place as inspiring as Gstaad. The magnificence of this landscape, and the silence and contemplation that it induces in those who are immersed in it, form an ideal context in which to give the public access to works in the collection that address important themes with great subtlety, as if whispering. I hope that the local community and the international audience alike will appreciate these powerful, heartfelt visions of the artists on show, as well as the experience that we have endeavored to orchestrate by placing these works within the elegant spaces of Tarmak22.”

Lantern With No Walls is a further step on the journey of experimentation into the relationship between moving images and architecture, on which the Fondazione set out with the exhibitions Penumbra (2022) and Nebula (until November 24, 2024), both staged at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice. In both of these cases, the aim was to “flesh out” the moving images and immerse visitors in a space in which sounds, images, materials and spatial interventions combine to make the viewing of the works a more perceptual and three-dimensional experience.

In Gstaad, as elsewhere, the interdisciplinary studio 2050+ was invited to conceive the set design for the exhibition and to bring its title to life in the form of a piece of temporary architecture. Via the use of semi- transparent materials and hanging structures that mark out the circular movement of visitors through the various rooms, the set design conjures up the image of a lantern: a lightweight and semi-luminous space, animated by shadows and sounds, glowing and vibrating with stories, within which the multiple echoes of the works form a punctuated, suspended sound environment.

https://inbetweenartfilm.com/en/lantern-with-no-walls/