Animated Worlds in the Animate Exhibition Series

European contemporary animations at the Pori Art Museum

Animated Worlds. European contemporary animations presents works by nine artists from France, Italy, Roumania and Sweden. They all engage with a complex of issues linked to our present moment from a perspective which can be envisaged as ‘European’.

Drawn from images taken from reality or documentaries (Florenty, goldiechiari, Ligorio), from direct experience (/barbaragurreri/group, Marisaldi, Muresan), from imagination (Djurberg, goldiechiari) or from art history (Simeti, Perrone), the exhibited works build articulated worlds which arise from a deep proximity within the artists’ experience and result in reflections on migration, geopolitical transformation, social relations, marginalization, cultural inheritance and physical or imaginary landscapes.

The common thread in the exhibition is the low-tech attitude pursued by the artists which makes their works probably less experimental in terms of the opportunities given by new technologies for contemporary animation, but highly consistent in terms of poetic resonances. Traditional animation techniques such as stop-motion, cut-ups, digital drawing, and claymation, are used to produce a certain distance from the subject matter, allowing viewers to build their own interpretative tools.

A compilation of the early Super-8 clay animations by Nathalie Djurberg, recently remastered with the music by Hans Berg and giving shape to metaphors of everyday violence, is presented facing the pathological world-relation represented in Elise Florenty’s work, the suspended destiny of migrants by /barbaragurrieri/group, the plastic dynamism of the sculptures in motion by Diego Perrone, the satellite vision of the Earth by Deborah Ligorio, and the constallation of sex toys by goldiechiari.

Two portraits are looped into a single projection, depicting the two ages of man: the bending beggar crossing the street in Eva Marisaldi’s work, and Ciprian Muresan’s street child sniffing glue as a product of the post-Communist era. The wild landscape taken from art history by Francesco Simeti is an ideal closing work for the exhibition, a back-to- the-future disposition towards reality.