Événements

Double Take

Preview April 15th 2024, 11.30am – 8.30pm

A plus A Gallery, San Marco 3073 Venezia 30124

curated by School for Curatorial Studies Venice

April 16th to July 15th 2024

Free entry

 

Artists: Paolo Cirio, Jesse Darling, Simon Denny, Kasia Fudakowski, Enej Gala, Monilola

Olayemi Ilupeju, Eva & Franco Mattes, Ahmet Öğüt, Barbara Prenka.

Coinciding with the preview of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia

A plus A Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Double Take curated

by the 2024 participants of School for Curatorial Studies Venice, which celebrates its

twentieth anniversary this year.

The term double take refers to the action of looking at something a second time that had

escaped notice at first glance, in order to discern something unusual or new that would

otherwise have gone unnoticed. Double Take is an invitation to reconsider, to pay greater

attention and care to the content hidden inside the works, to grasp their more implicit

meanings. is an indication to see beyond the immediacy of mere visual content, to take a

critical stance, to move along the boundaries of an increasingly hyperconnected and

dematerialized reality. Our attention span has decreased. Deep scrolling, ad bombardment,

censorship and online subliminal propaganda are progressively changing the times and

modes of content consumption, which is ingested without assimilation. In the so-called age

of hyper-information, information overload is generating a phenomenon of mass

distraction.

This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls 'surveillance capitalism', referring to the matrix of control

over the uncontrolled spread of information, a new form of exploitable capital. In the digital

panopticon of the new millennium, founded more so on individuals’ self-monitoring online

rather than explicit limitations, an increasingly dense network of control is being woven, the

repercussions of which are also felt in art: subjected to the imperative of ‘political

correctness, artistic production suffers a loss of content. Artists self-censor or look for new

forms and ways of artistic expression. As a result of these reflections, the gallery transforms

into a hypothetical surveillance office, where the works challenge the limit of what is

allowed to be said, moving between ambiguity and duplicity, in an attempt to circumvent

imaginary control devices. On display are works that reflect on the impossibility of explicit

communication through codes and visual references, requiring a second look to be

understood, thus calling for a double take. Through an imagined act of transgression, the

intention is to reclaim the independence of visual language and to indicate in art a possible

form of resistance, a stance against today conformity.