Curated by Andrea Lissoni
Since the early 1970s, Joan Jonas has been producing complexly atavistic, lyrical installations, often using video light as a fifth element and animating force in her cosmologies. Dogs, cones, stones, chalk lines, and landscapes figure large in the American artist’s lexicon of images and gestures as all flow smoothly through narrative and its fracturing, appearing and reappearing as drawings, sculpture, performative actions, and video. For this solo presentation, Jonas has chosen to darken the vast 43,000-square-foot hangar, removing all dividing walls, to present seven major installations and single-channel works, all viewable both front and back: Each piece, while occupying its own space, will recombine sonically and visually with the others. The story, however, will not end here in Milan. Preceding the upcoming Venice Biennale, where Jonas will be representing the US, this exhibition promises to confirm our sense that Jonas’s light shines brilliantly ahead of its time.
