FROM THE BOOK

This exhibition was born of the idea of investigating the artist and human being’s condition under a regime: what opportunities are offered and which aesthetic compromises required of the artist; what moral dilemmas and risks beset the human being?
The project concentrates on the artist’s role during the rise, establishment and fall of Fascism in Italy, using Italian art from the 1920s and 1930s as an investigative tool through an exhibition that attempts to recount official reality alongside the interferences that agitated it, presenting art and history together contemporarily.
It is an exhibition about our recent past, albeit it one that today feels necessary — due to similitudes between our past and present — in order to understand an uncertain world characterized by multiple perspectives. Being an artist today still means struggling with the restrictions of daily life and the forces that govern society, and we feel it is even more necessary to take a stand and think of culture within a broader context.
For us “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943” is a means for reconstructing the routes taken by those who dedicated their thinking — and in some cases risked or lost their lives — to projects and ideas that had more than just artistic recognition as a goal. They also aspired to cultural growth and at times even affirmation of Italy’s rights. This meant focusing our attention on the artist’s humanity, on his or her position as part of society and potential artifice of reality and change. It also meant acknowledging human weakness in the face of power, be it political, economic or social, as well as the consequences of choices made in the realm of art and the effects they can have on life in general.
Therefore the aim was both ambitious and extremely difiicult to realize, and certainly impossible without the collaboration of those public institutions, foundations, archives and families who have safeguarded the documents and artworks, factual chronicles and memories of these people. The result of this attempt is a group effort, a choral project, one built of many voices, in color and in black and white, organized in this book and in the exhibition into a chronological sequence in which, thanks to the images, we hope to have brought into focus twenty-five years that were decisive for Italy and, along with them, the stories of the many artists who worked in, experienced and helped make politics. Art+Life+Politics.