"Connection Gallery" is a project of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome - curated by Massimo Mininni - created to promote the work of young artists , called to create a site-specific work for the museum.
The first of the three moments dedicated to as many contemporary Italian artists, each selected and paired with a different curator, is the one that opens on June 17 with Andrea Mastrovito , author of the exhibition "Very Bad Things", curated by Ilaria Bernardi . With the aim of creating an environment capable of inducing reflection and active participation of the visitor, as well as of giving prominence to the feminine in art, the artist turns his attention to the complex relationship of woman with man and with power .
To do this, Mastrovito creates a space-time short-circuit freely inspired by stories that, although very distant in space and time, share the theme of sexual harassment: the biblical episode of "Susanna and the Elders", one of the oldest narratives on 'topic; current events involving the daily news and the #MeToo movement, such as the controversial story of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez ; the fable of Daphne who turned into a plant in order to escape the amorous ardor of Apollo, which she rejected, and many others. "Very Bad Things" draws free inspiration from multiple stories to outline an ambiguous and fictional narrative, in which the characters depicted are symbolic, unidentified or identifiable.
The reality of the facts, despite the underlying violence, is hidden between the different levels of reading to lead the visitor to reflect on the reiteration, in every era, of events about harassment against women and on how, very often, it is difficult to demonstrate the truth of facts. For this reason, through a particular expository solution, Mastrovito proposes the overlap between readable / unreadable , true / false , knowable / unknowable , to underline the seamless dichotomy between man's continuous attempt to know the truth and the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of distinguishing it from the lie. In an era like the contemporary one, where the media accentuate this complexity through the dissemination of many fake news , the object of investigation of "Very Bad Things" is therefore one of the most characteristic dramas of our time: the (im ) possibility of a communication intended as a real tool of information and knowledge on today's reality.