Artist Alma Alloro comes to Dresden’s S T O R E with her ongoing visual research project titled Magenta Dream™, running from December 18 to January 1, 2016.
In Magenta Dream™, Alloro examines the concept of branding through the aesthetic of the Ukrainian borscht soup, known for its distinctive beet-derived magenta hue, using the colour (hex code #FF00FF) as her point of departure into “a deconstruction of the product’s identity”.
The project takes the form of a cooking show filmed in front of a live audience, and chef Alloro will host mystery guests and discuss the “spiritual and sensual phenomena that seemingly occurs while making borscht”.
Pizza is the new religion. It holds the same cultural capital and promises the same healing powers for millennials that organized religion once did for their ancestors. The holy trinity is now divined in the three edges of a single slice, and its iconography is everywhere. It is the “universal, omnipresent, truly globalized concept”, the “symbolic hub and social equalizer”, “the super meme of our times”, “the Internet of foods”. It should come as a little surprise then that the 56th Venice Biennale has hosted the first international pavilion dedicated to pizza “as a cultural canvas”, curated by Paul Barsch and Konstanze Schütze and inevitably called the Pizza Pavilion,running May 8 to November 22.
In a artistic reversal of sorts, the Pavilion applies artistic strategies to an everyday phenomenon, creating a site-specific situation piece that reflects contemporary paradigms and their various manifestations. “It is,” as the press release states, “a practical philosophical endeavour that turns the working local pizzeria, Pizza Al Volo, into an international Pavilion”.
Anthony Antonellis, ‘Bauhaus Pizza’ (2015). Install view. Photo by Paul Barsch & Simona Lamparelli. Pizza Al Volo, Venice.
Participating in the piece are 19 different artists of the “post-digital” generation, invited to compose and title their own personal pizzas for a ‘Pizza Pavilion’ menu to be made available alongside the pizzeria’s regular one, including Santiago Taccetti, Lorna Mills, Alma Alloro and Tilman Hornig. The presence of the artist-produced pizzas, available for order, thereby turn the Italian pizzeria into an “art production studio and gallery, where one can witness the creation of an contemporary “artwork” and can buy and consume it directly”.
Berlin-based artist Alma Alloro will be presenting a solo exhibition Apophenia at Brooklyn’s Transfer Gallery, running from January 4 to 25, 2014.
Inspired by what in the video below is called an LTV (lowtekvision) -a device used to help the vision-impaired with viewing printed matter -the show presents hand drawings and animations exploring the imperfections of the human hand, its aesthetic effects and how it can be integrated with digital technology. Aphophenia itself is named after the experience of “seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”, so expect a critical look at the aformentioned subject, while the fact that LTV also happens to stand for the “lifetime value” of a customer in marketing could lend itself to the following Alloro quote:
“In its afterlife, the device exposes a ubiquitous short sightedness, rendering users of every generation blind to other potential (mis)uses of technology.”
The exhibition will also include a publication featuring an essay by Daniel Rourke.
