The redevelopment of the spaces, a new direction and a calendar of important exhibitions are the strengths of the Hangar Bicocca 2012
Fifteen thousand square meters on the northern outskirts of Milan. A versatile complex, built in 2004 by the conversion of an industrial plant, former Ansaldo Breda. Never fully exploited, the Hangar Bicocca is now living a season of rebirth, thanks to the funding of the Pirelli Foundation (3.5 million euros for 2012) and in line with the willingness of the Councillor Boeri to make of Milan an international capital of contemporary art.
Many are the introduced innovations. The spaces in the first place. Redesigned to accommodate the public and make the shows more enjoyable: think of the HB Kids Room, the HB LAB, complete with a specialized library, and the restaurant-bistro. And, again, the opening hours: twelve hours, from 11 to 23, four days a week. The exhibitions are free of charge. The screening of films (Cinema to be discovered, in collaboration with Interactive Mic-Museum of Cinema) and the creative activities for children on weekends (creative paths), the Digital Info wall by Claudio Sinatti, with informative contents on the activities and the multiple connections to the international art system. The model, in short, seems to be the Anglo-Saxon one, which considers the museum as a home for the arts, well integrated into the social fabric of a city, accessible to anyone at any time. For this reason the direction nominated Vicente Todolì as Artistic Advisor for the years 2013-2016, former director from 2003 to 2012 of the Tate Modern in London.
Waiting for Todolì, the artistic director Chiara Bertola and curator Andrea Lissoni signed the 2012 programme, looking at the contemporary art star (Carsten Nicolai, Studio Mumbai, Wilfredo Prieto), not to mention the permanent installations by Anselm Kiefer (The Seven Heavenly Palaces, 2004) and Fausto Melotti (Sequence 1971, 1981). Shadow play, on display until June 10, is an installation by the German conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann - already presented in Hannover (2002), at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (2001), the Art Basel (2008), the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2009) and the Venice Biennale in 2009 - where the tradition of the magic lantern and the theatre of shadows are present, in order to orchestrate a gigantic representation of time, memory and, in general, the human condition. Placed on a table of 20 metres, objects of daily use, appliances, toys rotate on revolving pedestals, projecting on the white wall behind it a net of shadows.
More focused on current affairs is the research of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, (Do Not, Do Not, Do Not, until June 10). Their works alter the communication sense of sources, conveying a message of social protest: just like in The March of Man (2001), created from archive images of the twentieth century (Hommes nègres studies of Etienne-Jules Marey, next to films of some ethnographers in the early twentieth century and then the sixties). Or in the multi screen installations located in the Cube: the four Electric Fragments (2002-2004), dedicated to the Roms, the Vietnam, the Italian economic boom and the indigenous Kanak population; the travel book Visions of the Desert (2000), the experimental documentary Terrae Nullius (2002) about the disastrous living conditions of Aboriginal people in the countryside, in contrast with the welfare of the city; Topographies (2007), revised from the images of an aviator during the First World War to demythologize the ideology of Futurism; up to the Triptych of the Twentieth century (2002-2008), a huge fresco on the dramas of the past century, including war, religion and ideology.
