Miart

Elena Damiani was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She studied Architecture at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas and subsequently transferred to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna where she graduated in Fine Arts in 2005. In 2010 she received her Masters in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Elena Damiani employs the disciplines of geology, geography, cartography, archaeology and astronomy to reinterpret such categorisations and our understanding of the physical world around us. Her fictional and constructed landscapes propose alternative readings of geological time, history and humankind’s classifications of evidence. Scientific source material, considered rational and immutable is presented as a cultural construct, subject to interpretation and infused with alternative value systems, redirecting for more poetic and suggestive readings. Damiani’s construction of fictions both emulates and disrupts our methodology of constructing meaning and knowledge via empirical observations. Her work reveals a search to gain understanding of how structures that obey a greater magnitude than the brief passage of man on Earth are composed and work. This search formulates a series of explorations which seek to reinterpret various natural stages and natural processes while confronting us with the idea we have of the world in which we live. Her most recent work explores fractures in time and geological events as symbols of constant change. The artist refers to geological features as indicators of a time before history. To Damiani, geology reveals the memory of the land.
Her work has been exhibited at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A (2022), Dhaka Art Summit (2020), DePaul Art Museum (2020), MOCO Montpellier Contemporain (2020), Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisboa (2019), la Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma (2019); Skissernas Museum (Lund, 2017); Chrysler Museum of Art, (Virginia; 2017), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Bienal de Cuenca (2016), IV Poly/Graphic Triennial San Juan (2015), Vienna Biennale (2015), Venice Biennale (2015), Museo Amparo (Puebla, 2016); MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico City, 2015); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2015), MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, 2015); Americas Society (New York, 2014), BIM Bienal de la Imagen y Movimiento (Buenos Aires, 2014), Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2013), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, 2013), MAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Lima, 2013), Government Art Collection (London, 2012), Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia (2009), MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2007), IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Valencia, 2007), Kunstmuseum (Bonn, 2006).
She was awarded the Grants & Commissions Program Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO (2016), the Commission for a permanent site-specific installation at the Americas Society’s David Rockefeller Atrium in New York (2014), the Special Mention to Video Creation at the International Festival of Digital Arts and Cultures of Gran Canaria (2006), 2nd Prize at the French-Peruvian Contest for Visual Arts Pasaporte para un Artista (2006), the Gold and Silver at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna (2005), the Production Prize in the 2nd Peruvian Contest Video and Electronic Arts (2004).
Work by the artist is included in international collections, including the MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, GNAM Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Art Jameel Collection, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo Tamayo, Kadist Art Foundation, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Schoepflin Foundation, PAMM Perez Art Museum Miami and FOLA Fototeca Latinoamericana. She currently lives and works in Lima.

Flavio Favelli was born in Florence in 1967, in 1993 he graduated at the University of Bologna with a degree in Oriental Studies, only afterwards beginning his career as an artist. He currently lives and works in Bologna (IT).
His works have been exhibited in prestigious international institutions, including: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (2022); GAM, Turin (2022); Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan (2021); Il bello inverso, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2019); Albergo Diurno Venezia, Milan (2017); UNIVERS, A METAPHYSIC STORE, Venice (2017); Art Basel Hong Kong – the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2015, 2012, 2010); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2012), MACRO, Rome (2012; 2011); RISO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palermo (2011), American Academy in Rome (2011, 2010); Tate Modern, London (2010), MCA, Chicago (2009), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008; 2007, 2002); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2008), Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2008), Benaki Museum, Athens (2008), La Maison Rouge (2007), MAMBO, Bologna (2007), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes, (2007); Creative Art Center, Beijing (2006); Musèe d’Art Moderne de Saint- Etienne, Saint- Etienne (2005), Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles (2004), Museion – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano (2003).
In 2012 the artist represented Italy at the 11th Biennale de La Habana and he has twice taken part – in 2003 and in 2013 – in the Venice Biennale. Flavio Favelli was chosen for the residence at the Italian Cultural Institute of Istanbul and in 2014 he had a solo show in the historic complex of the Galata Rum Okulu school.

Flavio Favelli creates works using old objects of décor or everyday use, such as lighting fixtures, picture frames, Fanta or Coca Cola bottles, trinkets that evoke the bourgeois aesthetic of the family environments he grew up in, or the Eastern cultures he studied at university. His works are collages, sculptures or installations in which these recycled materials are brought together, giving life to layers of meaning that isolate the object from its mere material reality, elevating it to an artistic dimension. This transition does not occur through the distortion of the object itself but rather through an amplification of its functional features, of its value as an object of use, as an object of décor, as an icon of the everyday life of the past, unwittingly existing in the present. The marked autobiographical component in these works (which also lies behind the artist’s rare performances), functions as a common filter for interpreting the various lines of inquiry that Flavio Favelli develops in all of his works, and, through a reflection on memory and the development of a “poetics of the object” centered around the exotic-everyday dichotomy, he threads together his own personal story with broader social history and political ideas.
Flavio Favelli’s works a marked sense of Italianness. In his art he develops and reworks the contradictions that came about with the rise of conceptual art (and pop-art) internationally, placing these theoretical frameworks inside the forms and achievements of the Italian conceptual tradition. The result are works with a hybrid soul, which make it difficult to know where to place him on the Italian art scene, and at the same time emphasizing the strong personal element that underlies the language used in each individual work.

Runo Lagomarsino (1977, Lund, Sweden). Lives and works in Malmö, Sweden.

Language, geography, historiography are themes that Lagomarsino revisits in his artistic practice, using materials that often evoke memories or a relationship to something, only to ask us to reflect on the conditions enabling these connections.

Lagomarsino’s work points toward the gaps and cracks in our explanation models highlighting language’s precarious foundation. With precise and poetic displacements, he constructs frictions, fractures of blind spots from where to tell other stories. Keenly aware of the conceptual implications of a range of materials and medium, Lagomarsino moves seamlessly between collage, drawing, installation, performance, and video.

Recent solo exhibitions include: We are here because you were there, Base/Progetti per l’arte, Florence (2023), The Square Between the Walls, Lunds Konsthall (2021), The Faculty of Seeing, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019), We are each other’s air, Francesca Minini, Milan (2019), EntreMundos, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2018), La Neblina, Galeria Avenida da India, Lisbon (2018).

Selected group exhibitions: The TV trampoline: from children’s television to contemporary art and literature, Bildmuseet, Umeå (2022), The four cardinal points are three: the south and the north, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2022), Ninguém teria acreditado, Pina Estação, São Paulo (2021), Deep Sounding-Hystory as Multiple Narratives, daadgalerie Berlin (2019), BRAZIL. Knife in the Flesh, PAC, Milan (2018), A Universal History of Infamy, LACMA, Los Angeles, (2017), La Terra Inquieta, Fondazione Trussardi, Milano (2017), Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2014) and Under the Same Sun, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014).
He also partecipated in the Guangzhou Triennial and the Gwangju Biennial (both 2008); the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2015); the Istanbul Biennial (2011); the São Paulo Art Biennial (2012); Prospect New Orleans (2017); the Gothenburg Biennial (2015 and 2021) and the Ural Biennial (2021). In 2019 he was awarded the Friends of Modern Museet Sculpture Prize and was DAAD artist in residence in Berlin.

Armin Boehm was born 1972 in Aachen. He lives and works in Berlin (D).
Armin Boehm paints fictitious and spatially impossible scenes, based on urban layouts and architectural constructions, that are meant to evoke the inner human condition.
In an interview by Gaston La-Gaffe on FAD Magazine, the artist said “The painted surface is as vulnerable as our skin and looking at it is reaching our emotional system very directly”. Due to his tough personal path he is attracted by the painted surface, which is able to deal with the unconsciousness and emotions of the human being.
The images, which sometimes appear to be aerial views or perpetually receding landscapes, explore the idea of natural and manmade borders in geographic surfaces.
His most famous works are large-scale paintings, constructed using complex combinations of materials including fabric, oil paint, pure pigment, metal, and sand.
A majority of Boehm’s paintings have dark palettes and depict nocturnal views with small sources of light; in preparation for exhibiting his paintings, Boehm has been known to paint the walls gray and dim the lights to deepen the experience of darkness. Other subjects have included interiors, smashed trees, bucolic scenes, and car wrecks.
He received a series of Awards in 1998, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (D) and in 2001, Cité des Arts, Paris (F).