by Claire Fontaine
Drawing on Bertolt Brecht’s Svendborg Poems (1939), the title highlights the necessity for artists to express their point of view in the darkest moments of History. For this reason, the exhibition at Galleria Solito in Naples, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, examines and foregrounds the impact that current geopolitical events exert on our lives.
The exhibition is primarily structured around the work entitled Ibis redibis non morieris in bello, whose first version dates back to 2006. It was first exhibited at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York on the occasion of Claire Fontaine’s second solo exhibition, Footnotes on the State of Exception, in January 2007, and was subsequently presented at the Lyon Biennale later that same year.
The meaning of the work is explained by the artists in a 2009 interview with Bart van der Heide, published in Metropolis M Magazine: It is a large circular neon sign, strongly quoting the idiom of Bruce Nauman, that...
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Claire Fontaine is a collective, conceptual and feminist artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in Paris in 2004. Their works have been exhibited worldwide, they are present in numerous museum collections and represent a space of resistance within the artworld to the transformation of artists’ authorship into brands and to the homogenization of formats and contents in times of censorship and crisis. The 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 was titled Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere after the series of their seminal neon works Foreigners Everywhere....
