The Merz Foundation presents, from Monday 21 February 2022 , the first solo show in Italy of the French artist Bertille Bak (Arras, France, 1983). The new site-specific exhibition project, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, curator of the Pinault Collection in Paris, takes its title from the main work, the video installation Mineur Mineur (Minor Miner).

For the Mineur Mineur project, the artist, grandson of Polish miners who were sent to work in the coal mines of northern France since the age of 13, takes inspiration from his personal story to tell the theme of child labor that still today deprives about 152 million children in the world of childhood, dignity and health. “Given the sincere empathy - comments the curator Caroline Bourgeois - the deeply honest and respectful desire to meet human beings in the grip of oppression and poverty, Bertille Bak's work can be seen and perceived in an honest way. Her purpose is not to make herself known, she, the artist, but to look carefully, with humanity, starting from the artist's naturally offset gaze, of the lives that could have been ours if we were born elsewhere. "

The space of the Merz Foundation and its infinite verticality inspired the artist, who chose to contrast the abysmal depth of the earth with this monumental height. The whole exhibition, which hinges on the main work, plays in fact on the continuous estrangement caused by a double register of reading of the works: an apparent playful regression to which the viewer is led, where however candor and brutality continually coexist. treats once again, for the artist, to affirm this propensity for the language of the fable, which unites all his projects, for the use of artifice, where between the lines we read of a reality of tragic destinies, of a truth contemporary, of a social story, which becomes a sort of memory archive, which intertwines the life of the people met with the production of a new common imagination.