For the third Spazio Cordis exhibition, we have chosen
a young artist of Polish origin, Michal Martychowiec, who is currently based in
Berlin. Martychowiec’s work displays an extraordinary versatility in the use of
various media (from photography to video, from installation to design, from
neon to the word as both signified and signifier). The artist also has an acute
analytical capacity with respect to history, literature, and contemporary socio-political
issues, with an openness to the international context that stretches from the
so-called Old Continent (with references to the classical tradition and, in
particular, to the Homeric poems, the Greek myths, and reflections on the
revolutions in France from 1848 to the present) to the Far East, for example
Japan, with his piece The Shrine to Summon the Souls.
The exhibition brings together a selection of works in
which the artist explores the concepts of violence, freedom and beauty in
relation to historical and social changes in the field of communication and the
exercise of power. In particular, Martychowiec proposes two intertwined
thematic nuclei: the repetition in history of episodes of violence linked to
affirmations of freedom, and the distortions in the relationship with the other
experienced by contemporary human beings in the age of the Internet and digital
technology. These are overlaid with a reflection on the exercise of power, not
only in the sense of "constituted power"