Exhibitions / My Religion is Kindness. Thank You. See You in the Future / Overview

Old Warehouse, Porta Genova Station
Via Valenza 2, Milan
November 14 – December 10, 2006

From November 14th through December 10th, 2006 the FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI presents My Religion is Kindness. Thank You, See You In The Future, the first major solo exhibition by Italian artist PAOLA PIVI, in the space of the Old Warehouse of Porta Genova Station in Milan.

With her sculptures, installations and performances Paola Pivi builds an upside-down world, a personal universe ruled by the laws of irony and absurdity. Paola Pivi’s works originate from colossal operations but they appear light, spontaneous and agile like an athlete's movements. Through changes of scale, duplications of objects or alterations of context, Paola Pivi’s magic realism transforms impossible actions into simple and disarming gestures. For her exhibition with the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Paola Pivi has conceived of an extraordinary and surreal selection of her works combining historical, recent and brand-new installations. The majestic industrial spaces of the Old Warehouse of Porta Genova Station are invaded by a joyful, but also unexpectedly threatening, collage of today’s world.

First presented at the Venice Biennial in 1999, and never exhibited since, Untitled (airplane) announces a blissful apocalypse in which objects come to life reshaping the order of things: a menacing war aircraft is flipped on its back and, while challenging physical and engineering rules, stages a radical overturn of our daily life.

All around it, the exhibition is occupied by a drove of completely white animals living all together as in a visionary countryside fair. In Interesting – produced by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi – horses, cows, dogs but also parrots, Japanese round-fish and llamas transform the Old Warehouse into a bizarre albino Noah's ark. At once both actors and audience, Paola Pivi’s white animals can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the spectacle of contemporary art: who is the living sculpture, the animals looking at us or we the confused visitors walking around the exhibition?

Realized thanks to the enthusiastic involvement of individuals, companies and shops in Milan, Guitar Guitar is an uncontrolled archive of thousands and thousands of objects, each presented as identical twins. As if in a crazy mirror of consumerist society, the twin objects in Guitar Guitar invite the audience to seek out the similarities and differences as if they were playing in a three-dimensional book of riddles, but at the same time it suggests the existence of parallel worlds in which any certainty is lost.

In a continuous search for forgotten and overlooked places in Milan that can be reshaped through contemporary art, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi arrives at one of the most fascinating industrial spaces in Milan, never used before for an art exhibition. The Old Warehouse of the Porta Genova Station, in the lively area of the Navigli, maintains an austere charm that recalls an abandoned cathedral: the Old Warehouse is the perfect setting to discover Paola Pivi’s Topsy-Turvy world.