Last night, the exhibition “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai” was opened in Milan; a project conceived by the artist and developed in collaboration with Rai, Italy’s national broadcasting company.
The opening took place in the presence of the Presidents of the Fondazione Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, and of the creator of the project Francesco Vezzoli.
Francesco Vezzoli said of the exhibition: ‘With this project, I wanted to set a path that was risky and dense—one as difficult as the subject requires—but also entertaining and surreal. A true investigation of this contemporary custom and its roots, informed by today’s critical sensibilities: 1970s Italian television produced rituals and, as a consequence, absolute, long-lasting myths that still today, presented anew in this exhibition, can inspire us to make unconventional choices.’
In between individual experiences and collective narratives, the exhibition translates the artist’s gaze into a visual experience that explores 1970s TV production. ’TV 70’ has been conceived as a sequence of visual and semantic juxtapositions taking place in the Nord gallery, in the Podium and in the Sud gallery at Fondazione Prada. The design of the show is based on the merging of spatial and temporal dimensions in a set-up which combines traditional museum exhibition standards with the screening of moving images, in alternating conditions of light and darkness. The sequence of immaterial documents from the Teche Rai archives combined with the materiality of paintings, sculptures and installations will develop in three separate sections, and analyse the relationships between Italian public television with visual art, politics and entertainment.
During the course of the exhibition Fondazione Prada will organize a series of marathons of the most significant Rai shows that experimented with TV storytelling: from documentary to women variety shows, from TV series to avant-garde theater. Contemporary audiences will be able to test how the innovative concepts, along with entertainment and research skills behind some of the shows produced by Rai, are still relevant after forty years and capable of producing an inspiring dialectic between past and present times.
The exhibition will be open to the public from 9 May to 24 September 2017.
