Adrian Paci / The Column / presentation
The Column came out of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a restorer, who needed a new marble sculpture for a cas- tle he was restoring. Somebody told him that it could be done in China, because they have good marble, good craftsmen, cheap labour, and they can be quick because they can actually do the work while the marble is being transported by boat. I found it terrific. It sounded so weird, simultaneously sick and fabulous, something mythological and at the same time in keeping with the capitalistic logic of profit—merging the time of production with the time of transport.[…] there is in this project a coexistence of something conflictual and something fabulous, something real and something fictional. […] there is a storytelling structure, and the chronicle of real facts mixes with legend and fairytale. Of course, one of the elements that I found stimulating with The Column was the production of a classical Western column model by a group of Asian workers on a voyage towards Europe. As you said, it is in a sense, for the column, a kind of “homecoming.
Adrian Paci
Born in 1969 in Shkoder, Albania, Adrian Paci lives and works in Milan. Originally trained as a classical painter, Paci has evolved a multifaceted body of work using a range of media including installation, photography and video. Informed by his personal experience of exile, his practice often engages with social inequality and migration. Paci’s early pieces explored these conditions using a documentary approach, while his more recent work has increasingly focused on the archetypes, rituals, symbols and allegories that are used to translate such painful and marginalizing experiences. His oeuvre represents exile as a form of spatial and temporal displacement that hinges on a sense of dislocation between an estranged homeland and a country of asylum, a nostalgic recollection of the past and an impossible promise of future idyll. Titled after a refugee camp for illegal immigrants, Paci’s video “Centro di Permanenza Temporanea” (2007) records a group of migrant workers escalating a ramp to board a plane, only to be left behind on the empty runway as the camera recedes, positioning the viewer as a privileged passenger on the departing flight. His works have been presented in international solo-exhibitions including: Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, Canada (2013); Galeries nationals du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey (2010); Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2010); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2008); Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2008). In 2008 he won the Premio Pino Pascali, Italy. Adrian Paci is represented by Galleria Francesca Kaufmann , Milan, Peter Kilchmann , Zurich and Peter Blum , New York.
(https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Adrian-Paci/1C39C8984E483DB7#more)
The presentation in Studio Golo Brdo was supported by Maistra, Hotel Adriatic, Rovinj and The Istrian County.