Exhibition: 10 February – 30 April 2023
Opening: Thursday, 9 February 2023, 19.00
Artist Talk: Friday, 10 February 2023, 16.00
Press visits can be arranged by appointment. Please register at: ifa-Galerie-Berlin(at)ifa.de or mail(at)corinnawolfien.com. We also cordially invite you to join the Artist Talk with Elisabetta Di Maggio and Chiara Bertola.
Artist Talk: Friday, 10 February 2023, 16.00
Elisabetta Di Maggio and Chiara Bertola
ifa Gallery Berlin, Linienstraße 139/140, 10115 Berlin
To launch its 2023 programme, ifa Gallery Berlin is pleased to announce Mapping the Air, a solo exhibition by the Italian artist Elisabetta Di Maggio (*1964). Moving within the scope of nature and the environment and showing organic forms, the exhibition takes up the broad themes of sound and earth – areas that the ifa Galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin look to jointly address in-depth in the new programme year.
This project revolves around a theme central to Elisabetta Di Maggio’s art: the communication networks that serve to transmit information. Her works reveal the close ties that exist among webs, circuits, grids and structures, which, despite belonging to different worlds, are part of our everyday lives.
When we think of circuits or webs, examples that come to mind include the complex venations of leaves, the tracery of lines on human skin, the routes of subway trains, or the intricate shape of a nerve cell: upon closer examination, these seemingly disparate things echo each other in many ways. Drawings of the synapses in our brains, for instance, resemble the roots and branches of trees, as meticulously detailed as illustrations in an old botanical treatise. The delicate filigrees of the plant world and the channels of the body suggest connections, reminding us of the intricate networks of human communication.
In the ifa Gallery Berlin, Elisabetta Di Maggio will be showing delicate works made of paper, cabbage and eucalyptus leaves, coral and entomological pins. Using a scalpel she lays bare finely branched systems and networks, highlighting analogies and revealing hitherto unseen connections. Her works on paper from the eponymous series Mapping the Air seem to float in the exhibition space like cartographies drawn in the air, their interconnections and processes as invisible as those with which life on earth develops. Walls are almost always built to divide things, and become lingering scars on our social and political landscape. In Mapping the Air, walls instead become membranes that continually open up new perspectives and paths even as they carve up space. Here, the walls are made of incised tissue paper, so one can walk past the barriers and look beyond them, moving on. The drawings that compose them are based on the real maps of various cities; they are put into relation with the structures of single-celled organisms, all on the same scale, mingling macro with micro. For a further series, Vuoto d’Aria, she arranges dried twigs alongside leaves and other materials in vitrines, making them appear to float within an airless space. The exhibition is completed by further objects and works on paper.
Elisabetta Di Maggio’s entire project, Mapping the Air, is thus a metaphorical reflection on our existence as parts of a whole, fragments of a natural world that, at the microcosmic and macrocosmic level, is constantly shifting and changing due to the extraordinary fecundity of its laws.
On Friday, 10 February 2023, will take place an Artist Talk with Elisabetta Di Maggio and Chiara Bertola.
To mark ten years of Contemporary And (C&), for the whole of 2023 this platform will be presenting a special edition of its analogue project C& Center of Unfinished Business at ifa Gallery Berlin. The opening is on 9 February 2023, in the frame of the opening of the exhibition.
About the artist:
Elisabetta Di Maggio (Milan, 1964) lives and works in Venice. She works with a variety of materials, from tissue paper sheets to small or large leaves, soap and porcelain, and with different surfaces, including plastered walls. Di Maggio’s works have been exhibited in national and international venues, including NMWA Washington, DC (2020), Museo Maxxi, Rome (2019), Arter Museum, Istanbul (2019), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2017) and are held in international museums and public and private collections, including Magazzino Italian Art Foundation (Cold Spring, NY) and Arter Museum (Istanbul).
About the curator:
Chiara Bertola (Turin, 1961) lives and works in Venice. She is Curator of Contemporary Art Program at the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice since 2000. She was artistic director at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan from 2009 to 2012. Creator and curator of the FURLA Art Prize (2015). Curator of the Venice Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. She has curated many exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, among others: Danh Vo (2022), Roman Opalka (2019), Elisabetta Di Maggio (2017), Jimmie Durham (2015), Christian Boltansky (2011), Hans Peter Feldmann (2012), Ilya & Emilia Kabakov (1989, 2003, 2012), Michelangelo Pistoletto (2013, 2000), Mona Hatoum (2009, 2014, 2015), Kiki Smith (2005), Lothar Baumgarten (2001), Joseph Kosuth (2000). In 2010 at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan she curated the international experimental project Terre Vulnerabili – a growing exhibition. The book “Walking along curating art” and the book "Conserving the Future" on the Querini Stampalia artistic project are in the process of being published.
Press visits
Press visits by appointment. Please register at: ifa-Galerie-Berlin(at)ifa.de or mail(at)corinnawolfien.com. We also cordially invite you to join the Artist Talk on Friday, 10 February 2023, 16.00 with Elisabetta Di Maggio and Chiara Bertola.
Press images are available in the press section of the ifa–Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Press contact
Corinna Wolfien, Books Communication Art, +49(0)175 5676046, mail(at)corinnawolfien.com
Miriam Kahrmann, ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Head of Communications, +49 (0)7112225 105, presse(at)ifa.de
Ausstellung
Elisabetta Di Maggio
Mapping the Air
Exhibition: 10 February – 30 April 2023
Opening: Thursday, 9 February 2023, 19.00
Accompanying Events
Opening of the Special Edition of C& Center of Unfinished Business:
Thursday 9 February 2023
ifa Gallery Berlin
Save the date: 18 March 2023: Panel discussion at the ifa Gallery, followed by an anniversary party at ACUD
To mark ten years of Contemporary And (C&), for the whole of 2023 this platform will be presenting a special edition of its analogue project C& Center of Unfinished Business at ifa Gallery Berlin. The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room that offers visitors an unusual collection of books that, in different ways, deal with colonialism. The number of these books has increased to a degree that it is now rather unsettling. The reading room will be a guest at ifa Gallery Berlin until December.
Artist Talk: Friday, 10 February 2023, 16.00
Elisabetta Di Maggio and Chiara Bertola
Book launch: Thursday, 13 April 2023, 19.00
Conservare il Futuro/Conserving the Future
By Chiara Bertola, 25 years of exhibitions at the Foundation Querini Stampalia.
With the support of: Italian Council
Further information can be found on the website of ifa gallery Berlin: untietotie.org
About ifa
ifa–Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen promotes a peaceful and enriching coexistence between people and cultures worldwide. ifa supports artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue and conference programmes, and it acts as a centre of excellence for international cultural relations. It is part of a global network and relies on sustainable, long-term partnerships. ifa is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart. www.ifa.de
Über the ifa Galleries
The ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin present contemporary art in a global perspective, addressing post-colonial movements and artistic reflections on the themes of migration and cultural transfer. The work of the ifa Galleries is based on seeing the world from a diversity and plurality of perspectives, discovering new stories, and shaping emancipatory processes, interactions, and artistic spaces. Our focus is on long-term relationships with artists, partners, and visitors, and our exhibitions and education programmes are developed through practices of collaboration that trace global entanglements and piece them together in new forms of narrative. www.ifa.de
Contact and opening hours ifa Gallery Berlin
ifa-Galerie Berlin
Alya Sebti and Inka Gressel
Gallery directors
Linienstraße 139/140
10115 Berlin
ifa-Galerie-Berlin(at)ifa.de
www.untietotie.org
@ifagalleryberlin
Tuesday – Sunday: 14.00–18.00
Thursday: 14.00–20.00
Admission free
Special opening hours / Gallery Weekend Berlin
Friday, 28 April 2023: 12.00–21.00
Saturday and Sunday: 29/30 April, 12.00–19.00