Press release
Sissi. Manifesto Anatomico
Museo di Palazzo Poggi (Via Zamboni 33)
22 January – 22 February 2015
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte (Palazzo d'Accursio, Piazza Maggiore 6)
Museo Civico Archeologico (Via dell'Archiginnasio 2)
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio (Piazza Galvani 1)
22 January – 8 March 2015
Exhibition curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, Sabrina Samorì
Promoted by Istituzione Bologna Musei
In collaboration with Istituzione Biblioteche del Comune di Bologna, Sistema Museale di
Ateneo – Università di Bologna
With the Manifesto Anatomico project, expressly created for the third edition of ART CITY Bologna,
Sissi offers for the first time to audiences a comprehensive reading of the principal themes of her
artistic enquiry through an installation involving four different exhibition venues: the Museo di Palazzo
Poggi, the Collezioni Comunali d'Arte, the Museo Civico Archeologico and the Biblioteca
Comunale dell'Archiginnasio.
The ample extent of the show, which specifically explores the theme of the metaphorical construction of
a metamorphic body, makes the project a complex and amoebic exhibition-organism that is animated in
its various constituent parts, delineating an encyclopedic vision of the artist’s imagination. The title itself
seems to deliberately play with the double meaning of the term ‘manifesto’, intended both as a
programmatic set of inspirational creative principles and as their disclosure in a public forum.
Imagining the historic center of Bologna, where the artist was born and continues to live and work, as a
setting of expansive potential for her creative process, Sissi builds a narrative universe with four distinct
yet intertwined trajectories, wherein the installation of new works and earlier works displayed in an
unprecedented way is expressly designed to generate a dialogic resonance with the historical density
of the four exhibition venues, and to trigger a stimulating counterpoint with the permanent collections in
a prospect of new meaning.
All the languages that the artist has adopted to develop her poetics of body-thought are represented
here: installations, drawings, video, sculpture and performance provide the gaze and the senses
of the viewer with an all-encompassing esthetic experience.
The Museo di Palazzo Poggi, which close earlier than the other three venues on 22 February 2015,
hosts an installation on the theme of Anatomia Parallela, a performance and publishing project which
started out in the late ‘90s as Sissi’s thesis at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna and is still today at
the center of a process of germination that assumes ever different forms. It is a work conceived as a sort
of ‘emotional manifesto’ that proposes a new idea of corporeality: a re-reading of the organism and its
functions in relation to the emotions that course through it, transforming it internally.
The Sala di Susanna, a temporary exhitibition space in the university museum, hosts the third edition of
the handmade artist’s book Anatomia Parallela I, recently acquired for the collection of MAMbo –
Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna through a private donation. The pages, rich with illustrations that
mimic the look of a 17th-century anatomical treatise, describe as if in a fantastical encyclopedia the
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performative body seen from the inside of its dissected organs. Sissi describes the book as “an essay on
internal emotional anatomy described scientifically, which I studied and reformulated, adapting it to
myself”. Indeed, the anatomical study is accompanied by technical entries, images, drawings,
bibliography and references, all invented but tied to the author’s own biography.
In the same space hangs Anatomia Parallela II, a set of 16 anatomical plates, framed and mounted on
the walls, on the complementary theme of the body’s surfaces, intended to be used during
performances hosted by important anatomical theaters in Italy and abroad.
Completing the installation in this first venue is the video Animatomie (2013), viewable in the Stanza di
Notomia. In a 3-minute stop-motion animation, a series of drawings illustrates a cycle of five lectures on
the manipulation of the body through symbolic gestures of dressing and dressing up, in dialogue with
the famous wax statues of the “Spellati”, realized by Ercole Lelli of Bologna in the mid-18th century, the
first systematic production of anatomical wax models.
The second articulation of Manifesto Anatomico is situated in the Collezioni Comunali d'Arte in
Palazzo d'Accursio, specifically in the Sala dei Primitivi which houses altarpieces and wooden crucifixes,
most notably that of the Master of the Franciscan Crucifixes dating back to the 13th century.
Here the artist has chosen to show the organic circuit of Anatomia Parallela with the installation
Apparati di un discorso organico (2014). A series of metal structures of varying dimensions display
3-dimensional elements in ceramic, painted and embroidered canvas, garments with sculptural
extensions and large-scale drawings with gazes magnified on an anatomical body. The piece is intended
to represent a sort of museum of Anatomia Parallela, staging the objects with which the artist’s
anatomical ideas have blossomed over time.
In the same room, lying on the floor, is Il naufrago: ondeggia ubriaco perdendo la testa (2012), an
installation of a human skeleton composed of small fragments of driftwood. An exercise in the
archaeology of the contemporary, an attempt to reconstruct the genesis of a lost body that Sissi
explains as “an abstract, confused, material thought, like the sea that dilutes messages, losing them
like a shipwreck that bobs on the drunken waves, the sea undresses at the shore, revealing its
contents”.
The Gipsoteca of the Museo Civico Archeologico is the space that makes visible the principles of
organic reflection on the body and on the transformation of its emotional impulses into style.
The artist intervenes in the prized collection of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture with an
incursion that comments on the ancient statuary, in a game of mimetic comparison, by placing
mannequins dressed in clothes and accessories from Addosso 1995/in progress, the archive of the
wardrobe-creature composed of the clothing and accessories handcrafted by the artist herself and
subsequently worn and catalogued according to a taxonomic system of 20 categories, each with its own
name and specific distinctive features. The work, which establishes a symbiotic relationship between
body and clothing, conceived as emanations of each other, also includes written entries that provide
detailed documentation identifying every single element, such as the date of creation and subsequent
modifications, the day it was first worn, the unconventional materials of which it is composed, the
category it belongs to, the feelings and memories with which it is associated, and a photograph.
The project concludes at the Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio with an installation entitled
Confronti, dedicated to the artist’s anatomical enquiry.
In the Ambulacro dei Legisti situated on the main floor of the building is a series of ten display cases,
each containing work tables. The materials exhibited include drawings, diaries with work notes, ideas,
studies, small relics and objects painstakingly classified that become traces whose chronological
stratification and typological variety constitute an archive/self-portrait of the artist’s eclectic identity.
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In a lab-like atmosphere reminiscent of Sissi’s studio, the installation draws the viewer’s gaze to the
sphere of sources of inspiration for some of the specific themes on which the artist insists: clothing,
archaeology, body, anatomy, encyclopedic study. A suggestive iconographic correspondence can be
found in the juxtaposition with a series of richly illustrated ancient books (like the Monstrorum historia
by Ulisse Aldrovandi, printed in Bologna in 1642, and the Opera omnia by Marcello Malpighi, printed in
London 1686 under the aegis of the Royal Society) belonging to the library’s exceptional holdings, whose
selection arose from the artist’s fruitful collaboration with Anna Manfron, director of the Biblioteca
dell'Archiginnasio.
Lastly, the practice of performance, a preferred form of artistic expression since the beginning of her
career, finds the ideal stage in the 17th-century Teatro Anatomico of the Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio,
where the artist will give a public lecture on anatomy on Sunday 25 January at 5.30 pm.
Positioned in the center of the amphitheater in the guise of a scientist illustrating her manifesto, the
artist proceeds to dissect the book-body Anatomia Parallela, turning its pages reproduced on a large
scale through a manual slikde show accompanied by an oral narration.
The event is the final appointment of the performance project Anatomia Parallela in Tour after stops
in Padua, Turin, London and Pistoia. Free admission from 5.15 pm, until depletion of available seats.
The performance will be preceded on Saturday 24 January by an open public talk that the artist will
conduct at 4.00 pm at the Aula Magna of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna.
Manifesto Anatomico, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello and Sabrina Samorì, is an exhibition promoted
by Istituzione Bologna Musei in collaboration with Istituzione Biblioteche del Comune di Bologna and
Sistema Museale di Ateneo – Università di Bologna in occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2015.
Istituzione Bologna Musei is supported by:
Regione Emilia – Romagna, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Fondazione del Monte di Bologna
e Ravenna.
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Biographical notes
Since the beginning of her career, Sissi develops an artistic research founded on a deep analysis of
different fields, starting from a scientific or technical basis to arrive at a parallel taxonomic dimension,
or even a imaginative one, capable to give new identities to things.
Her research starts from the human body, declined within an artistic process. This process, through the
manipulation of disciplines like anthropology, archeology, anatomy, give life to a reflection about cultural
and political dynamics, related to the human corporeality contextualized in our society.
Sissi uses many medias to analyze and explore these dynamics. Performance, installations,
photography, drawing, or even painting and artist’s books, are fundamental in her expressive language.
A language that winds itself in multiple research ravines, bound together by a unique thread, that
characterize her work. This thread is the reflection, with which the viewer have to compare even
unintentionally, that through a glance into a such intimate and introspective work, but emotionally
universally readable, inevitably marks the most hidden ravines of those who come in contact with her
imaginative dimension.
She has held many solo and group exhibitions at: ART CITY Bologna (2015); The Old Operating Theatre,
London (2013); Aike-Dellarco Gallery, Shanghai (2013); Museo del 900, Milan (2013); Fondazione
Volume, Rome (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, Zagreb (2012); Turku Biennial, Turku (2011); Tate
Modern, London (2011); Fondazione Pomodoro, Milan (2010); 53th Venice Biennial (2009); Mizuma
Gallery, Tokyo (2008); Quadriennale, Rome (2008); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); Chelsea Art
Museum, New York (2006); Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz (2003); Poëziezomer
Watou, SMAK, Gent (2003); Moca, Miami (2001).
In 2012 she won the Gotham Prize, in 2006 she won American Academy in Rome’s scholarship, in 2005
she gained the New York Prize by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 2003 Bologna’s Modern Art
Gallery (GAM) gives her Alinovi Prize, and in 2002 she won Premio Furla per l’Arte.
In 2008 she joined Tokyo Wonder Site - Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture’s
residencies’s program, in 2006 she won a scholarship at Italian’s Academy at Columbia University in
New York, and in 2004 she has been invited as artist in residence at Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum
Joanneum in Graz.
She worked closely with companies like Furla for the Furla&I and Candybrissima Show projects
(2010/2013), curated by Fondazione Furla, and in 2012 with Elica for the Aspiranti Aspiratori project,
curated by Fondazione Ermanno Casoli.
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Infosheet
Title:
Sissi. Manifesto Anatomico
Curators:
Gianfranco Maraniello, Sabrina Samorì
Venues and opening periods:
Museo di Palazzo Poggi (Via Zamboni 33)
22 January – 22 February 2015
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte (Palazzo d'Accursio – Piazza
Maggiore 6)
22 January – 8 March 2015
Museo Civico Archeologico (Via dell'Archiginnasio 2)
22 January – 8 March 2015
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio (Piazza Galvani 1)
22 January – 8 March 2015
Performance Anatomia Parallela in Tour: Sunday 25 January h 5.30 pm
Teatro Anatomico – Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio
free admission from 5.15 pm until depletion of available seats
Public talk with the artist:
Saturday 24 January h 4 pm
Aula Magna – Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna
free admission until depletion of available seats
ART CITY Bologna opening hours:
Friday 23 January
Museo di Palazzo Poggi > 10 am – 8 pm
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte > 9 am – 8 pm
Museo Civico Archeologico > 9 am – 8 pm
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio > 9 am – 8 pm
Saturday 24 January
Museo di Palazzo Poggi > 10 am – midnight
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte > 10 am – midnight
Museo Civico Archeologico > 10 am – midnight
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio > 9 am – midnight
Sunday 25 January
Museo di Palazzo Poggi > 10.30 am – 8 pm
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte > 10 am – 8 pm
Museo Civico Archeologico > 10 am – 8 pm
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio > 12 noon – 8 pm
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Ordinary opening hours:
Museo di Palazzo Poggi
from Tuesday to Friday h 10 am – 4 pm
Saturday, Sunday and holidays h 10.30 am – 5.30 pm
closed on Mondays
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte
from Tuesday to Friday h 9 am – 6.30 pm
Saturday, Sunday and holidays h 10 am – 18.30 pm
closed on Mondays
Museo Civico Archeologico
from Tuesday to Friday h 9 am – 3 pm
Saturday, Sunday and holidays h 10 am – 6.30 pm
closed on Mondays
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio
from Monday to Saturday h 9 am – 7 pm
Sunday and holidays h 10 am – 2 pm
Tickets:
during ART CITY Bologna
free entry for holders of any Arte Fiera ticket
during the rest of the opening period
Museo di Palazzo Poggi | full € 3,00 – reduced € 1,00
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte | full € 5,00 - reduced € 3,00 free with entrance ticket for Museo Civico Archeologico
Museo Civico Archeologico | full € 5,00 – reduced € 3,00 free with entrance ticket for Collezioni Comunali d'Arte
Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio | free entry
Press Office:
ART CITY Bologna 2015
Silvia Tonelli
ph. +39 051 6496612 - silvia.tonelli@comune.bologna.it
Comune di Bologna
Raffaella Grimaudo
ph. + 39 051 2194664 - raffaella.grimaudo@comune.bologna.it
Online press kit:
can be downloaded - following registration - from the Press Area
of the MAMbo – Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna website
www.mambo-bologna.org/ufficiostampa/cartellestampa/
Websites:
http://agenda.comune.bologna.it/cultura/artcity
www.comune.bologna.it/cultura/
Promoted by:
in collaboration with:
Istituzione Bologna Musei
Istituzione Biblioteche del Comune di Bologna
Sistema Museale di Ateneo – Università di Bologna
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