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Closed during holidays.
Opening 13 febbraio 17.30
Introducing:
 
Tommaso Sacchi, Assessore alla Cultura, Comune di Firenze
Valentina Gensini, artistic director Murate Art District
Justin Randolph Thompson, co-founder Black History Month Florence.

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito

An exhibition that examines the implementation of social obligations towards dirty work, the shortcomings of cultural assimilation, the silencing of histories and the politics of respectability.

The artists in the exhibition each draw upon experiences of a periods of permanence in Italy that pushes them to engage the cities of Rome, Umbertide, Milan and Florence as sites for cultural production with the need to engage history while not falling victim to it.

Activist Pape Diaw, in a 2013 interview spoke of “…sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito “, literally getting our hands dirty to do a clean job. This contradiction is at the core of a social context where dirty work is engaged in to maintain a status governed by the politics of respectability and social policing.

The exhibition, curated by Black History Month Florence, as part of the 5th edition of BHMF, in collaboration with Villa Romana (Florence), Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Umbertide) and Galleria Continua (San Gimignano), presents the work of 6 international artists who have used the Italian context as a place of artistic production. A series of transversal works leads to a reworking of stereotyped notions of Made in Italy that tend to exclude Afro-descendents, revealing colonial attitudes and inviting and breaking preconceptions.

An insistence on personal narratives as an override to the flattened projections of Blackness, the construction of bridges between a colonial past and a neo-colonial contemporary reality and the ethereality of monumentality all infuse these works with a meditation on the past as a marker of what’s to come.

Together they form a harmonic melody that is discordant with the prescribed, centralized, consumed narrative but finds just enough alignment to relay its power to enrich the age-old tune

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Concept by the curator

Justin Randolph Thompson, co-founder and director Black History Month Florence

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Introduction by the curator

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2020 Introduction

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Justin Randolph Thompson about Amelia Umuhire

Justin Randolph Thompson su Amelia Umuhire

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Janine Gaelle Dieudji about Delio Jasse

Janine Gaelle Dieudji su Delio Jasse

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Justin Randolph Thompson su Nari Ward

Justin Randolph Thompson su Nari Ward

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Janine Gaelle Dieudji about Adji Dieye

Janine Gaelle Dieudji su Adji Dieye

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2019 Justin Randolph Thompson about Sasha Huber

Justin Randolph Thompson su Sasha Huber

Sporcarsi le mani per fare un lavoro pulito BHMF 2020 Janine Gaëlle Dieudji su M'Barek Bouhchichi

Janine Gaëlle Dieudji su M'Barek Bouhchichi

Adji Dieye

Photographer

Adji Dieye is an ItaloSenegalese photographer born in Milan in 1991. She graduated in New Technologies for Art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. Over the past years she has been traveling between Milan and Dakar, focusing her research on the influence of advertisement in the African visual culture. Her work explores different facets of West African societies; the influence of advertising in the construction of a national identity and the syncretic spirituality that remains central... to African communities.

Adji Dieye’s artistic practice pushes the boundaries of photography in an attempt to investigate the archetypes that constitute African visual cultures. In her research, the continent is never considered an end in itself; instead, it represents a bridge towards further investigations into broader social and geopolitical realities.

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Amelia Umuhire

Video artist, director

Amelia Umuhire, born 1991 in Kigali Rwanda, lives as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin. In 2015 she wrote and filmed her first web series, Polyglot, in which she follows young deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists with her camera. The series has been shown at numerous festivals, including the Festival D’Angers, the Tribeca Film Festival and the Geneva International Film Festival, where it was named Best International Web Series in 2015. Her short film Mugabo is an... experimental short film set in Kigali. It explores the question of how to return to one´s homeland and how to deal with the past. In 2017 it was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival and is currently touring festivals in North America and amongst others screened at MOCA Los Angeles, the MCA Chicago, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. In 2018 Amelia Umuhire produced the radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. It tells the story of her father Innocent Seminega as a young student, teacher, husband and father until his death at the hands of the Hutu extremists. In February this year Umuhire had her first solo exhibition at Decad Berlin.

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Delio Jasse

Photographer

Delio Jasse was born in 1980 in Luanda, Angola and lives and works in Milan. In his photographic work, he often interweaves found images with clues from past lives (found passport photos, family albums) to draw links between photography – in particular the concept of the ‘latent image’ – and memory.

Jasse is also known for experimenting with analogue photographic printing processes, including cyanotype, platinum and early printing processes such as ‘Van... Dyke Brown’, as well as developing his own printing techniques.

Recent exhibitions include: MAXXI, Rome (2018); Villa Romana, Florence (2018); Biennale dell’immagine, Lugano (solo, 2017); Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm (2017); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2017); Bamako Encounters, Bamako (2017); Lagos Biennial, Lagos (2017); Tiwani Contemporary, London (solo, 2016); Walther Collection Project Space, NY (2016); Dak’art Biennale international exhibition (2016); and the Angolan Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He was one of three finalists in the BES Photo Prize (2014) and won the Iwalewa Art Award in 2015.

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Nari Ward

Fotografo, video artista, scultore

Nari Ward (nato nel 1963 a St. Andrew, Giamaica; vive e lavora a New York) è noto per le sue installazioni scultoree composte da materiale di scarto trovato e raccolto nel suo quartiere. Ha riutilizzato oggetti come passeggini, carrelli della spesa, bottiglie, porte, televisori, registratori di cassa e lacci delle scarpe.

Ward ricontestualizza questi oggetti trovati in giustapposizioni stimolanti che creano significati metaforici complessi per affrontare questioni sociali e... politiche che circondano la razza, la povertà e la cultura del consumo. Lascia intenzionalmente aperto il significato del suo lavoro, consentendo allo spettatore di fornire la propria interpretazione.

Mostre personali del suo lavoro sono state organizzate presso l’Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); SocratesSculpture Park, New York (2017); The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2016); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2015); Savannah College of Art e Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2015); Museo d’arte della Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA (2014); The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2011); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); e Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001, 2000).

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M’barek Bouhchichi

Visual artist

Born in 1975, Akka, Morocco, he lives and works in Tahanaout next to Marrakech where he teaches art. Using painting, sculpture, drawing or even video, M’barek Bouhchichi develops his work through a tentative language grounded on the exploration of the limits between our internal discourse and its extension towards the outer world, the actual, the other. He places his works at the crossroad between the aesthetic and the social, exploring associated fields as possibilities for... self-definition.

Recently, his work has been exhibited as a solo show Les mains noires (Kulte, Rabat, Morocco, 2016), as collective exhibition Documents bilingues (MUCEM, Marseille, France, 2017), as well as Le Maroc contemporain (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, 2014), Between walls (Le 18, Marrakech, Morocco, 2017).

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Sasha Huber

Photographer, video artist, performer

Sasha Huber (CH/FI) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Huber’s work is primarily concerned with the politics of memory and belonging, particularly in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions,... video, photography, and collaborations. Huber is also claiming the compressed-air staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, aiming at dismantling the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. This long-term project (since 2008) has been concerned with unearthing and redressing the little-known history and cultural legacies of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), an influential proponent of “scientific” racism who advocated for segregation and “racial hygiene”. Huber has had solo exhibitions such as at the Hasselblad Foundation (Project Room) in Gothenburg and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th la Biennale di Venezia in 2015 (collateral exhibition: Frontier Reimagined), the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, and in the 29th Biennial of São Paulo in 2010.

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Sporcarsi Le Mani Per Fare Un Lavoro Pulito is the first collective exhibition that opens the semester dedicated by Murate Art District to an international horizon:
“MAD dedicates the first semester of programming to international residencies and exhibitions that investigate the Afro-descendant culture, then the Middle East and finally the Far East with Japan – underlines Valentina Gensini, artistic director of MAD Murate Art District -. The renewed collaboration with BHMF and Villa Romana takes the form of two exhibitions of great importance: one on the Black Archive, the other on important international artists called to reflect on post-colonial rhetoric and a certain contemporary neo-colonialism, which imposes painful negotiations with history, collective memory and its amnesia, but also with the future, which calls for a clear change of perspective”.

 

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