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A
GAMeC press release "Holocaust Day (January 27th) commemorates
the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 and has been instituted
in memory of the genocide and persecution of the Jewish people and Italian deportees
to the Nazi camps. This year the Assessorato alla Cultura
and GAMeC will commemorate this day through an exhibition of the works of Yoko
Ono, following those by Fabio Mauri in 2005 and William Kentridge in 2006. The
solo show consists of the installations We're All Water, the renewed version of
Pieces of Sky and Mother Earth a new work realized for this occasion. We're
All Water, made in 2006, consists of a series of transparent glass bottles filled
with water and labelled with the people's names. As the title suggests, Pieces
of Sky is formed of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of the sky that each visitor can
take. The work is sometimes contextualised by placing the "pieces of sky"in
different containers, such as helmets from World War II, or, in this case, a funeral
urn.
Mother Earth, the third work in the show, was specially
devised by the artist for this event and is composed of three handfuls of earth
from cemeteries of different religions - Christian, Muslim and Jewish; writings
by the artist completed the work. Yoko Ono has always explored
the dynamics of participation and communication, arguing that while suffering
exists in the world no personal happiness is possible as the experience of the
individual is linked to its universal equivalent. Thus processes of individual
transformation are identified with those of political transformation. Central
themes of Ono's work are the concepts of love and peace, which the artist believes
are the only way for humanity to create a better future for itself."
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We're
All Water and Mother Earth at GAMeC. © Matteo Bonaldi
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