Luca Pozzi opens up a uniquely meta show this weekend at HOC/gallery, presenting his video Instagram Time Paradox, running at the art space from March 15 to May 17.
The video, described as an “explicitly Newpressionist project”, was inspired by Pozzi’s experiences at The Eternal Internet Brotherhood (Dead Sea, 2014). It shows Pozzi walking through the opening of the Fontana-Klein show at Milan’s Museo del ‘900.
He holds an object that looks like a smartphone and dutifully records every detail of the exhibition, much like most of the other patrons at the gallery. But upon closer inspection, his “smartphone” is revealed to be the most advanced portable device available in the late 1950s, during the era of the artwork displayed – a rapidcalcolo, or predecessor to the calculator.
Six months later, the Museo del ‘900 exhibition wraps up, and Pozzi presents his video, “a performance closely linked to the mimetic aspect, to a visual short circuit, and therefore to an unavoidable physical reality”. To add another layer to the experience, he uploads the video to Instagram. In a sense, he is doing what everyone of Instagram’s 100 million active users does, but the layers of self-awareness and irony add the sheen of art, a reflective surface as opposed to a purely consumptive one.
See the FB exhibition page for details. **