Contemporary art increasingly tends toward multimedia. Even in the first decade of our new century, artists are working on the border of many languages, tending toward the production of works of total art, the result of a synthesis capable of developing an interweaving of figurative art, cinema, theater, literature, and photography.

The contemporary artist seems to take up from one hand the Renaissance model of Leonardo and Michelangelo who operated to 360 degrees and on the other that of Wagner who theorized and practiced the 'opera opera as a place capable of totalizing all languages of art.

This trend has developed continuously since the beginning of the last century, to starting with the historical avant-gardes: Futurism, Abstractionism, Surrealism and Dadaism. From the 1950s onward, artists have felt the need to further abandon their own specifics: to get off the wall, exit the screen, transcend the space of the stage to arrive atopera as an installation capable of hosting forms of interweaving of different languages, the result therefore of assemblage and contamination of genres.

The project-which kicks off this year with a prologue at the Rocca Albornoz-intends to document theopera of artists who are already well-known on the international art scene, but it also aims, in the framework and spirit proper to Spoleto Festival dei 2Mondi by tradition open to experimentation and dialogue between the different languages of art, to be the creator of new discoveries and finally to trespass towards performances, concerts, meetings and projections for the entire duration of the Festival.
Achille Bonito Oliva

GROUND FLOOR - EDUCATIONAL HALLS

Peter GreenwayTHEICE TIME

40,000 years in 4 minutes

2012, 5 media players and 5 monitors, 4', color

editing Irma de Vries, soundtrack Huibert Boon, programming Matteo Massocco

"We can certainly say that very soon there will be a re-displacement of landmasses as the oceans rise higher and higher. And there will soon be a flood to which will be followed by ice. We can say that humanity is a type of life forced to to flourish in the short intervals between two ice ages.

Meteorological changes are slow, continuous and devastating to the evolution of the species. Here in five sequences is the tale of the predicted next event condensed into four minutes. Forty thousand years in four minutes."

This is how the Welsh filmmaker, with a background and vocation as a painter, describes his latest installation, who-preaching the death of cinema-has pioneered the crossover between film language, painting, literature and new digital technologies.

Ahmet Güneştekin

BELEK (Memoirs)

2012-2013, video projections and sound

On the walls and floor of a dimly lit room, images of dates between 1909 and the present day, between the massacre of the Armenians in Adana and today's events in Taksim Square, flow in sequence. A soundtrack synchronously plays original voices and sounds that refer to to those events.

Turkish artist Ahmet Güneştekin thus interrogates our and his people's collective memory about the series of violence and attacks on human rights that have taken place in just over a century in that part of the world.


FIRST FLOOR - HONOR ROOM AND PINTA ROOM

Shrin Neshat

THEATER IS LIFE. LIFE IS THEATER.

Don't ask where the love is gone.

Photography by Luciano Romano

2012, B/W, 9 giclee prints on hahnemühle paper and dibond

Commissioned from City of Naples and Naples Metro/Toledo Station

At the end of a residency to Naples to also compete with one of her own opera in the construction of the Toledo metro station designed from Oscar Tusquets, Shirin Neshat fixed in dramatic black-and-white images nine actors and actresses from Neapolitan underground theater. They are nine bodies that seem to force their way through the walls of a prison without place or time. "I seek universality that can apply to everyone," says the Iranian-born American artist. "Beauty must be united with feeling, with 'social and political commitment. from alone beauty remains an aesthetic canon and commitment a cry. Only united do they become something we can call art."

SislejXhafa

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHT

2013 blanket, newspaper, clothes

Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin

A body is lying on the ground, entirely hidden from an old blanket. We do not know who it is, whether it is sleeping or drunk, resting or dead. The title that the Kosovan artist has given to 'opera does not help us to unravel the enigma and indeed contributes to reinforce our doubts as casual spectators. But also blameless? Sisley Xhafa points il dito precisely at the complexity of the political, economic and social realities of contemporary reality and does so by simple means, now with irony and now with acid derision, which is not easy to classify. "Reality is stronger than art," says Sisley Xhafa, "As an artist I am not interested in reflecting reality, but I want to interrogate and question it."

Shoja Azari

THE KING OF BLACK

2013, HD video color, sound, 24'

Courtesy Leila Heller Gallery, New York

The video The king of black mixes silent film techniques, images of precious Persian miniatures, theatrical action, and digital animation in an original way. The story is based on the epic poem Haft Paykar (the seven beauties) written in 1197 from Nizami of Ganja, the greatest epic writer in Persian literature whose poems offered subject matter to all the miniaturists of the following centuries.

Nizami's morality tale describes the impatience of a prince who, violating the call to perseverance of one of his seven wives, is forced to leave the Garden of Eden. Behind the allegory of the ancient poem, artist Shoja Azari born to Shiraz and residing to New York thus critiques the social and political reality of his country.

Sri Astari Rasjid

UNDERCOVER, UNDERWEAR, UNDERWORLD TROOPS
Soundtrack by Rahayu Supanggah

2013, fiberglass, stainless steel mesh & mixed media

The abiding concern of Indonesian Sri Astari's artistic work is to reread the traditions of Java culture and its symbolism through the lens of the encroaching Western-originated life style that has rapidly changed the values scenario in her country's social life.

Particularly at the center of her critique is the position of women, with all its contradictions, between roots of tradition and rampant consumerism. But such criticism often takes the form of humor, as in the depiction of the seven figures suspended between ancient elegances and erotic winks, ambiguously in counterpoint with Rahayu Supanggah's soundtrack.

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