Current

OPENING RECEPTION
THURSDAY 8th NOVEMBER 2018 – 9 PM

9th November 2018 > 18th January 2019

Giovanni Hänninen
Layered Mumbai. A preview

Curated by Adelaide Santambrogio

The photographic research of Giovanni Hänninen is born by a collaboration with Studio Mumbai Architects with the aim to highlight the urban stratification of the city of Mumbai. The photographic work hosted by Km0 is the beginning of a research that pursues to create an atlas that uses photography as a tool for analyzing the dynamics of the urban environments. Mumbai is the twelfth richest city in the world for gross domestic product. At the same time it is a place of extreme disparity. In a decade, its population has more than doubled. In the last five years alone, the inhabitants have increased from 16 to over 22 million of which over 55% live in slums: very high-density neighborhoods composed of dilapidated buildings, often without basic services such as water, sewer, electricity. They were built outside of any written rule, often exploiting interstitial spaces between other buildings, infrastructures, natural barriers. Meanwhile, Mumbai, in a race to pursue one of the most sudden growths in history, is looking for more spaces for new towers and new infrastructure. The skyscrapers make space to recover – rehabilitating, they say – the areas occupied by slums. No matters that part of the history of the city and a large part of the economy still resides there, in those slums, where not only live desperate, but workers, doctors, lawyers and all the other roles at the base of every social and economic system.

Giovanni Hänninen (Helsinki 1976) lives and works in Milan. PhD in Aerospace Engineering, he is Professor of Photography for Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic. He is a stage photographer of Filarmonica della Scala and makes photographic research for important public and private institutions. His images are already part of museum and private collections. In 2017 he was exhibited at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York with the Thread project. Among his projects: Milan Downtown (2010), Rendering the City (2011), Milan UP (2011), Roland Ultra’s Travel (2013), Mix City (2014), cittainattesa (2012 – 2015), Mi-Bg 49km (2015), Thread (2017), Senegal / Sicily (2017).

Antonio Ottomanelli
Specters of now

Curated by Adelaide Santambrogio

Km0 is pleased to present Specters of now, the new work of artist Antonio Ottomanelli, part of the larger project Santuario Europa. Antonio Ottomanelli’s research was initially born, starting from 2009, as investigation on the landscape of reconstruction and on the relationship between man and territory in some of the most marginal and conflicting areas in the world – particularly after 11/9 – such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Over the years, Antonio Ottomanelli has focused in particular on the public space investigated as a place of conflict that is not born solely from a war or terrorist matrix but also from the relationship between control strategies for public security and individual and autonomous forces that seek ever higher degrees of freedom and emancipation. With Specters of Now, Antonio Ottomanelli turns his attention both to the territory of Mashreq (the geographic area comprised between Egypt and Iraq) and for the first time to the European territory, through an environmental installation and photographs; the exhibition presents a series of asphalt sections, whose size varies according to the average incidence of terrorist attacks in Mashreq and in Europe throughout their history. Large-format photographs show in a 1: 1 scale the specific portions of public pavements in Berlin (Germany) and Sesto San Giovanni area (Milan) in Italy. The asphalt equates victims and oppressors, narration of a trauma that has become an integral part of our physical and cultural environment. As Joseph Grima wrote, Ottomanelli looks to the inhabited landscapes as a register of human activity, consisting of both destruction and reconstruction. The representation of the landscape is critical but not judgmental. Following on from the teachings of masters Luigi Ghirri, Gabriele Basilico or Gianni Berengo Gardin, Antonio Ottomanelli rather questions the ability of contemporary photography to be able to read the complex dynamics of the present.

Antonio Ottomanelli was born in Bari in 1982. He studied architecture in Milan and Lisbon. Until 2012 he was a professor in the Urban Planning Department at the Milan Polytechnic. In 2009 he founded IRA-C – interaction research and architecture in crisis context – a public platform to promote research in the field of urban and social strategies. His work has been presented in numerous international exhibitions and institutions: in Berlin, Arles, São Paulo, Dallas, Holon, and Amman. His first personal exhibition – Collateral Landscape – curated by Joseph Grima, was held in 2013 at the Triennale di Milano. In February 2016 his personal Kabul + Baghdad was inaugurated at Camera Torino, curated by Francesco Zanot. He took part in the 14th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice and in the first Design Biennial in Istanbul. In 2016 he founded Planar, a center dedicated to contemporary photography, based in Bari and publisher of Planar Books. He is editor of The Third Island, published in 2015, the first in a series dedicated to observing the impact of major infrastructures on the territory and consequent social impact. Named FOAM Talent in 2016. Among his most recent and important exhibitions are: Eye-Hand Span.The uncertain distance between the eye and the hand at Galleria Montrasio Arte in Milan, October 2016, and in Juli 2018 La Partizione del sensibile for the Festival Universo Assisi.

Paul Leitner
The Collapse of Reason Through Endless Pleasure

Curated by Barbara Cortina

Km0 is pleased to announce the exhibition The Collapse of Reason Through Endless Pleasure – the first solo show of the artist Paul Leitner (Wien, 1983) for its exhibition spaces. The exhibition opens simultaneously with the official opening of the 2018 edition of the Innsbruck’s Premierentage. Paul Leitner works with everyday tools, prefabricated or industrial components and objects trouvé (like thermometers, light bulbs, manholes, train tracks, car-jacks) that, after a careful study, he slightly modifies, adapts or transforms. The artist conducts a sort of investigation of form and matter, through a process that has as its final outcome the narration of a new identity of the object, not necessarily linked to its original function. The exhibition will host new production works, adapted to the exhibition context; in addition, the three works of The Traveler series (2012-2016) will be presented together for the first time, kinetic sculptures in which a wind tunnel maintains a seed or a plant element suspended in the air, in a perpetual motion that prevents its fall but at the same time precludes any other form of mobility apart that artificially generated by machine. The research of Paul Leitner plays with the canons of aesthetics and function, in a subtle balance between respect for norms and industrial standards and their subsequent refutation.

Paul Leitner, born in 1983 in Vienna; lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Brigitte Kowanz. Among the most important exhibitions: MAK, Vienna 2017, Galerie Unttld contemporary, Vienna 2016; Kunsthalle Wien (2015), artists’ village Neumarkt an der Raab (2013), Neue Galerie, Innsbruck (2012); in 2011 awarded with the price for young art of the province of Lower Austria for the Diploma Thesis “paper-jack”.