Massimiliano Gioni

  • Adrian Paci, Per Speculum, 2006, color photograph, 31 1/2 x 47 1/4".
    previews January 2008

    Adrian Paci

    For more than a decade, Milan-based artist Adrian Paci has been exploring the themes of migration and displacement from a personal—and at times painful—perspective.

    For more than a decade, Milan-based artist Adrian Paci has been exploring the themes of migration and displacement from a personal—and at times painful—perspective. Working from his experience as an Albanian émigré in Italy, Paci has created a body of work in which nostalgia and longing have given new forms to forgotten traditions, folkloric myths, and popular rituals. His most recent films and videos are testaments to the traumas of globalization, but they also display an archaic beauty, evoking Pasolini's religious atmospheres and cult of simplicity.

  • print December 2006

    Massimiliano Gioni

    MILAN PROBABLY DOESN’T EVEN EXIST. Though still called Italy’s “moral capital,” the city has become slightly irrelevant, surpassed by Turin and Rome as a center of cultural participation and production. Or, more accurately, Milan has turned itself into an expensive luxury item, an accessory powerful in its beauty yet strangely unnecessary, even unreal. Little by little, Milan could easily come to resemble one of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities: Anastasia, the metropolis that awakens desire only to suffocate it.

    Milan is a city of broken promises and frustrated dreams. In recent years, each new

  • print December 2004

    EVERYBODY WAS THERE: THE WRONG GUIDE TO NEW YORK IN 2004

    DIDN’T SEE BUT HEARD IT WAS GOOD Stephan Dillemuth performance @ Reena Spaulings and Gavin Brown’s enterprise at Passerby; Amar Kanwar @ Peter Blum; Tara Mateik @ Reena Spaulings; “The Dreamland Artist Club” (Creative Time) @ Coney Island; Iran do Espírito Santo @ Sean Kelly; Black Dragon Society @ apexart; Derrick Adams @ Triple Candie; “presence: 25 Nights of Individual Performance Events by Various Artists” (curated by Michael Mahalchick) @ Canada; Peter Caine @ ATM; David Wojnarowicz @ Roth Horowitz; Ilya and Emilia Kabakov @ Sean Kelly; Alix Pearlstein @ Salon 94; Ed Ruscha talk @ the