5779. 6A/12 – Piero Golia

Through specific concepts, forms and acts, Piero Golia has created works that subvert the convention of contemporary art. His works often happen in the public sphere, although they don’t belong to any specific rubric, they are neither land artworks, nor public art. For instance in 2006, echoing the work of Bas Jan Ader, he disappeared from New York; three weeks later he reappeared in Copenhagen in order to give a lecture at the Royal Academy of Arts focused on this very act of disappearance. In 2010, he created Luminous Sphere, a glowing orb installed on the roof of the Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, that lights up only when the artist is in town and is turned off when he is travelling. In 2005, and again in Los Angeles, he started a project with artist Eric Wesley, MSA^, the Mountain School of Art. While this project echoes the legendary “Black Mountain College”,  it also challenges the boundaries between a school, an artwork, a bar and a community center, mixing art making, education, networking and friendship. Conceived as part of a body of work meant to disorient the spectator, Welcome, upside down, not only continues the initial spirit of its creation but becomes, at a time like ours, a relevant and poignant statement.

BUILDINGBOX is an independent space within the premises of BUILDING, characterized by its own unique program. The opening project, curated by Nicola Trezzi, opens on the week of Rosh HaShana, which is the beginning of the new year – the year 5779, as the title says – according to the Hebrew calendar.

Following these premises, a window gallery which is visible 24/7, and a calendar which consists of 12 months (Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, Elul, Tishrei, Marcheshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat, and Adar), 5779 is a group exhibition in which several artworks are not present next to each other but rather one after the other. The structure of the calendar – day after day, month after month, year after year – becomes the guideline for the presentation of artworks by several artists; in doing so, this structure transforms the essence behind group exhibitions, from coexistence and juxtaposition to linearity and procession.

Furthermore, this specific format deconstructs the very core of the group exhibition format, which is, by definition, an exhibition in which several artworks, by several artists, are presented next to each other in a confined space and for a specific amount of time. With 5779 the idea of a group exhibition in which works of art by several artists appear, in the same space, one after the other – substituting one another, replacing one another – suggests an inversion in the equation at the base of exhibition making. Rather than rooting exhibition making into space, as it usually happens, this time the exhibition is rooted in time rather than space.