OVERSEA

Art from Mediterranean
Painting, photography, video, music, performance

Curated by Antonio Manfredi
Opening 20 December 2008 at 18.30
20 December 2008 | 20 February 2009

On the 17th of April at 6.30pm CAM opens up to video art. Casoria museum is already renown for its attention to visual language and turns now into a multimedia container, a platform over which almost all worldwide video art will pass by.  CAMMOVIE is the name of the yearly event/container hosting four sessions: GLANCES, CENSURED, MAGMART,  VIDEO LOOP. CAMMOVIE first edition (17 April/30 May 2010) curated by Antonio Manfredi will begin focusing on Iran, looking at Persian video art production (GLANCES session). The visual metaphors, in Iranian glances, turn into a vehicle of messages of protest against the oppressive power of its government and hint at deep reflexions on Iranian society: the women subordinate condition, the economy games with its surrounding nations, the experienced war, the theories connected to the Twin Towers. The flow of images spaces from a documentary to a fine oneiric and estrangement language through 22 videos, some of which previously participated to important western events (like Documenta 11), meanwhile other ones have been produced by dissident artists forced to flee to Europe. Along with the videos there will be an installation dedicated to Neda Aqa-Soltan, one of the victims of the fights in Teheran against the Iranian government, which images have been displayed throughout the world thus becoming the symbol of the Persian Green Wave.  Ironically framing the event are the astute satirical sketches by Simona Bassano di Tufillo revealing the difficulties of women wearing Burqua. A performance by Rokhshad Nourdeh, Iranian artist living in Paris will take place, too. During the morning of April the 17th the artist will walk through the streets of Naples leaving brochures with her words on them, then bringing on the top of the Vesuvius a coloured flag, symbol of unity. Rokhshad Nourdeh walk means bringing to another place the flow of people crowding Iran streets during the past months. The performance will continue during the night (April the 17th at 7.30pm) at CAM during the opening of CAMMOVIE. The cultural event will also touch another session of the platform,CENSURED, with the projection of the movies by Jafar Panahi which have been prohibited in Iran. The Iranian director has been arrested on the First of March 2010 for his activity in opposition to the Iran regime, due to his project of a movie on the contests. A wink to the censure in our country will not be missing, like those programs which disappeared from TV and then appeared on the net (Raiperunanotte). The two more sessions are a further research by Casoria museum, a door open to the art production on video. The VIDEO LOOP session presents a selection of videos coming from some of the most important International festival of video art: Optica Festival_Spain, Streaming Video Festival_Holland, Video Play Festival_Argentina, Videoholica Festival_Bulgaria, NamaTRE.BaProject_Bosnia Herzegovina, VideoChannel_Germany and AllArtNow New Media Art Festival_Syria in cooperation with Visualcontainer_Italy. Also, the  MAGMART session which once again confirms its presence at CAM, partner of the renown international festival at its 5^th edition. 30 videos winners of the competition will be presented and become part of the permanent collection of CAM.

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Concept of art works
Maryam Abdelwahab | Egypt
Sekhmet is a Goddess in ancient Egypt, represented as sleeping figure. Evil goddess brings war and destruction to the human world. The goddess is portrayed in a static condition, unable to negatively act because of the sleep, thus revealing a positive energy; the figure looks serene and wrapped in coloured coils, in fact, revealing a long for truce and peace.

Marija Bjekic | Serbia
The painting almost looks monochromatic. Wide black-to-grey backgrounds offer the vision of an isolated figure looking far and thinking. The used non-lively colours sharpen the sense of introspection opening outwards and seeming to relate to it though the posture.

Severine Bourgignon | France
The painted object is metaphor of the word and philosophy of the artist. Not just a simple flower but the need of a voice out of the chorus, not necessarily a shocking communication but with a sharp and pleasant impact. The thin outline stands clean on the fragmented and scraped background of pictorial filaments as if to define an unshaped universe on which artistic sensibility stands out.

Nisrine Boukhari | Syria
The video plays on and analyzes identity and the metaphor of transformation. Assuming defined roles bewilders while defining its non-involvement in the canons imposed from outer vision. Existence questions on the being and on the valence of one’s own inner vision fight against external fictitious characters with which a relationship is found almost based on brotherhood.

Carlo Caldara | Italy
The photographic cut of the portrait together with the used support provide noticeable visual impact to the work. The direct gaze of the protagonist goes along the challenge and attack gesture directed to the viewer. Being not centered, the figure leaves space to the background reflex of her image. The whole is melted, multiple points of view distract the eye and the initial menace opens to a reflection on recondite perspectives.

Carmen Carmona Fernandez | Spain
A diver appears in the highest moment, while curling up to twist and throw in the empty. The physical effort and concentration in completing the gesture are praised by the colours surrounding the sportswoman as vivacious aureole meanwhile transparent plastic looks like water that, like a veil, protects those immerging. The impunity of the title is the lack of sufferance for those ones staking, accepting the challenge with themselves risking to loose.

Maria Dimaki | Greece
The swimming sinuous figure is Talassa, an ancient sea goddess representing the Mediterranean sea personification. Overlapping the image with a human foot radiography means identification to the Mediterranean populations, heirs of a sea uniting them. The beyond and physical mix creating a game of shadows and colours giving birth to a structural alliance trying to justify the common derivation.

Fathi Hassan | Egypt
The work is graphic representation of a journey. Like lining camels, the aesthetic signs of the Egyptian artist follow bending to the conceptual. The word declines towards art and looses the meaning valence. The path looks lonely, without reference points and, above all, silent as a man in the desert. References to the origins and to old memories becomes concrete in a continuous line seeming everlasting without any temporal suspension.

Fathi Hassan | Egypt Video
The work analyzes the original language of the region in-between Egypt and Sudan: Nubia. Nubian population traditions and culture are only transmitted by word and the video reveals this ancient use. A woman speaks with her body language while on the background voices are heard: the gesture language is universal and contrasts with the verbal language, the one of knowledge.

Mohamed Al-Hawajri | Palestine
Basically, Arabian writing is tending to decorativism. During history it substituted the human representation, back here in this painting. Figures look surrounded and wrapped by the word, as a whirl containing them and defining their ideologies and feeling. The external symbols belong to the ancient traditions or just recall metaphors and allegories of ancient populations that, forgetting their common past learnt to use language as separation and art as union.

Ajili Houda | Tunisia
The use of lively colours overturns the traditional representation of the artist belonging nation. The tune spots superimpose in a collage in which shading brush strokes are readable, giving to the painting a pleasant chromatic freshness

Dusa Jesih | Slovenia
The perfect definition of the space beats moments of mind organization. All the time, day and night, it is enclosed in geometrical gorges hiding questions, doubts and reflections. Lines cross and build a net which is no prison but an ordered universe or just apparently ordered by inner laws.

Natasa Ljubetic | Croatia
The embroidery and golden frame are the memories of the artist. The work proposes what had to appear in the artist parents house, now living back and becoming concrete in a liquid spread, without that sensation of matter painted objects belong to. As if in a trip back in the time, colours modify and come back, get dusty and assume an ancient valence, far from the present but intensely lived.

Caroline Navarro | Malta
Dense brush strokes summarily sketch the landscape. Sunny colours are softened by the wind shaking everything though serene. Veils swell while the sun brightens the architectures on the Mediterranean island. Almost an impressionistic view of the landscape visually immediate and with a feeling of belonging to a land made up of sea and brightness.

Vahida Nimanbegu | Montenegro
This work represents a reality we cannot see or describe but which existence we can only sense. The abstract description moves away from reality but nearer to the inner feeling. Lines and shake intertwine while colours seem to define hidden depths. These are the shifts of the mind stimulating reflexion and thought.

Manolo Oyonarte | Spain
Portrayed figures seem to whisper existence questions and their deformations suggest references to the history of contemporary art. Architecture structure and latent slipping characters are sensed. They are ancient doubts or thoughts visualized as impending shadows.

Anna Photiadou | Cyprus
A winged being looks leaned to the wall of a building. The atmosphere looks surreal, almost oneiric and the female character looks protagonist of a story in which she is suspended waiting for an event. The geometrical scan of the space defines the ambits of the action though leaving space to the imagination. The representation touches deep spheres of sensibility astonished and stimulated to an inner search.

Pilar | France
Both sadness in the face or will to make inner a deep feeling can be read through the wood carve. The mouth looks more defined maybe because hurting words come out from it. Around the subject a carousel of figures from a universe of memories. Anyway the face overlooks them, thus imposing its presence with a fix gaze towards the future.

Michele Quercia | Italy
The definition of the architectonic field in the work defines two areas of interest: the lower part in which leaves represent the silent nature and the upper part in which a big figure with non-defined traits stands out in a domestic inside. The isolation felt in the outer world can be recognized in the leaves while the sensation of inner loneliness is represented by the anonymous – therefore universal – man at the window.

Marcus Shahar | Israel
The parade of the artist in posa presidenziale on the luxorious car through the streets of his city is ribaltata from the background interviews to people affirming they ignore his existence and affirming his anonimate. Common people do not know the artist and antepongono cooking or a game to the importance of art in society. An ironical denounciation  of  common condition.

Sivan Shahar | Israel
The work of the Israeli artist is a self-portrait. The depiction of a glance through the mirror, an image reflected revealing hidden conditions and thoughts. The sign is resolute and small colour touches define the figure. The pictorial impasto drafting reveals the technical skills, recalling historical experiences and the correspondence to a personal feeling towards the world.

Pedrag Szilvassy | Slovenia
The work is the vision of a magical world where female figures dance looking for thoughts. The used iconography recalls renaissance pictorial tradition, filtered through the contemporary sensibility also thanks to the use of recycled materials and to their overlapping technique. The skills of the drawing line widens in a gentle though full-bodied shaded dipping the viewer in another dimension.

Eliana Vamvakinos | Greece
The bed-ship emerges from the sea, the amniotic liquid out of which the being detaches and in which he first built himself. The ship veils on the liquid surface to fly high towards the other, the external looking for awareness in a personal and confronting journey with different identities. It looks like all appears in an oneiric and metaphysical atmosphere, metaphor of the introspective analysis the human persegue.

Khaled Sabsabi | Lebanon
Ancient sounds insinuate from far. Desert and sea sounds, though also of big metropolis of the Mediterranean are perceived as a sole notes body.

Lino Vairetti | Italy
The geometric figure is the three-dimensional representation of the object. The paper ship proceeds along the sea, ploughs the waves – this time sound – and has the name of the Mediterranean by the ancient Romans: Mare nostrum. The view from more points helps to get a whole glance on the world living on the dock shore which news, as reported from media, are often frail and partial.

Ciccio Merolla | Italy
One of the most accredited percussionist of the Italian scenario with an International sound with atmospheres deriving from universal influences. Suggestions of the metropolitan Neapolitan culture melting with Arabian, African and Indian sounds.

Sergej Andreevski | Macedonia
Through quick and defined movements the work comes out from the artist brush, from hi sensations and from the analysis of the Macedonia history and the context in which it currently appears. The gesture footprint brings on the canvas impressions and his inwardness lived through the language of art.