Underskog

Open Forum is glad to invite you for a talk with Lorenzo Idrofano. The talk will be followed by a little open forum party/gathering.

Lorenzo Idrofano was born in 1981, Roma, Italia. Lorenzo Idrofano is an Netherlands-based performance artist, mainly known for his work in the area of institutional critique. He is currently a member of C*U*N*T, the College of 100.000 names.

Idrofano’s brand of performance from 2006 popularized the institutional critique art movement, a loosely-formed artistic practice meant to critique the very institutions that are involved in the sale, display, and commerce of art. Idrofano’s work typically comments on the politics, commerce, histories, and even the self-assuredness of the modern-day art museum, including the hierarchies and the exclusion mechanisms of art as an enterprise. His performances, despite having serious homo-erotic undertones, are often presented in a humorous, ironical, ridiculous, or satirical manner.

The most famous intervention of Lorenzo Idrofano is Museumnacht Interventie (Amsterdam, 2010). About this work, realized with the artists Arik Visser, Ehsan Fardjadniya, Giancarlo Pazzanese, Mathilde Jansen and Thijs Rhijnsburger, Lorenzo Idrofano writes:
“The idea of this intervention at museum night occurred to us by reading few recently published books and articles, which tried to open a new chapter of the critical practice and institutional critique. We found the museum night a right moment to comment on this neo-liberal, popular cultural policies, demonstrated by the museums in an even like n8 (museum night amsterdam 8).
By thinking about those artistic practices from late 1960s and early 1970s, when artists practiced critically towards the institutions, which by that time were museums mainly but not only, this movement has moved to a second weave from 1980’s. When critical art and practice has become part of the institution itself. In both ways as Simon Sheikh notes : " institutional critique was a practice mainly, if not exclusively, conducted by artists, and directed against the (art) institutions, as a critique of their ideological and representative social function(s)." But now what does it mean when the critical practice of artists against the museums has been changed to the practice of the curator of director of the institution itself? Internalizing the critique can be seen as a way of controlling the critique in the space of the white cube designed for it. The Museum Night Intervention is a start of an experiment of self-organized action and performances that is consciously decided to take place outside the art institutions or rather the “white cube”. An experiment and/or a try to argue a new wave of Institutional Critique as artists practice. A method of critique that can criticize the Institutionalized Critique or as S. Sheik said: " A machine of control within new modes of governmentality- politics and education""

Welcome !

H&T.