Exhibition

The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City

8 Jun 2023 – 9 Sep 2023

Regular hours

Thursday
16:00 – 19:30
Friday
16:00 – 19:30
Saturday
16:00 – 19:30
Sunday
16:00 – 19:30

Free admission

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On the occasion of the opening of our Project Space in Venice, Fondazione Marta Czok presents a selection of works from its Collection, seen in dialogue with video artists and film-makers from around the world, in a special collaboration with Urban Visions Film Festival and A-Place.

About

Curatorial Notes

Jacek Ludwig Scarso

The Renaissance concept of the Ideal City is here a provocation to critically explore the ideological connotations of the urban context and the need for social change, locally and globally. As focal points for transient civilizations, cities are built, rebuilt and destroyed, becoming, both metaphorically and literally, battlefields for power games: social injustice, economic greed, the desire for supremacy, indifference to an increasingly fragile ecosystem are the backdrop to the lived experience of citizens. The result of human intervention, cities appear to be in constant development, while hiding an increasingly unstable nucleus. Glimmers of hope are offered by the resilience of citizens who, undaunted, fight social hardship, through individual and collective efforts. 

The depictions of the city in Marta Czok's paintings, which vary in period from the early eighties to the last decade, show a satirical perspective on social hierarchies. In these works, the powerful believe that they are unstoppable, yet the world they want to dominate is nothing more than an ideological construction: all is contingent, all is transitory, all can be overturned. At the other end of the social scale, ordinary citizens appear helpless, but it is through their work that the riches of a city are built and that social change is truly made possible.

In dialogue with these works, we present a selection of short films from Urban Visions – Beyond the Ideal City, an independent film festival promoted by City Space Architecture and curated by Luisa Bravo. Part of the European project  A-Place – Linking places through networked artistic practices,  the Festival is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union. Within this selection, with which we also celebrate the first ten years of City Space Architecture, we find a set of perspectives from all over the world, in which the city is told in relation to the contexts of migration, social injustices and resilient communities.

Thanks to this dialogue, The Rise and Fall of the Ideal City aims to be a stimulus for  critical reflection on the urban context, but also for inspiration on how artistic languages in different disciplines may bring new ideas and important testimonies with respect to this context.

CuratorsToggle

Jacek Ludwig Scarso

Anna Marazuela Kim

Luisa Bravo

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Marta Czok

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