【99专访】叶兰：“他性”是美之根源 Eleonora Battiston ：“OTHERNESS”——The Origin of Beauty

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0条评论 2015-09-08 13:39:48　来源：99艺术网　作者：丁晓洁翻译：孙源

Eleonora Battiston is an Italian art critic and curator born in Bologna in 1978 and currently living in Spain. She got a top grade Degree in History of Art of East Asia at Bologna University in 2002. She studied at Beijing Language and Culture University between 1998 and 2003. She lived in Beijing from 2005 to 2010.

Since 2003 she has worked as art director for different art galleries in Milan (Italy), Beijing (China), Bologna (Italy) and Valencia (Spain). She curated several exhibitions in important art foundations as CARISBO (Bologna, Italy) and BSI (Lugano, Swiss), and museums as PAN (Naples, Italy), Suzhou Art Museum (Suzhou, China), Palazzo Reale (Milan, Italy) and Sala Josep Renau (Valencia, Spain). She curated a section of the Prague Biennale in 2005 and 2009 and a parallel exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

To date, she has contributed with critical essays to nearly thirty books on contemporary art published by important editors as Damiani (Milan), Electa Mondadori (Milan), MEF Firenze Atheneum (Florence), GianpaoloPrearo (Milan), Skira Editions (Milan), Timezone8 (Beijing), Today Art Museum Publishing House (Beijing) and Maretti (San Marino), among others. Since 2002 she has written for art magazines as Flash Art (Milan), Zoom (Milan), Tema Celeste (Milan); Segno (Pescara), Next Exit (Roma). After spending more than fifteen years in researches and studies on Chinese and Asian Contemporary Art, she is actually based in Spain working and making projects on contemporary art between Asia, Europe and the Americas.

99 Art : Is this the second time you participate in a large exhibition project in Nanjing ? When did you start to cooperate with curator Zhutong ? What do you think of the development status of contemporary art in Nanjing ?

Eleonora：I met Mr Zhu Tong more than 10 years ago and we have collaborated to several projects in Europe (Italy, Switzerland, Spain, etc) and in China. In 2010 we co-curated the Second Nanjing Biennale and now, with the Second Nanjing International Art Festival, I am happy to be back to Nanjing and to see how it is growing as cultural and artistic centre.

99 Art ： as we all know , “A Beautiful New World” is the theme of The Second Nanjing International Art Festival. So , what do you think about it ?

Eleonora：At the beginning this theme sounded very stange to me especially in a time when the world is suffering a lot of wars, tragedies and episodes of intolerance. Many times our world doesn't seem to me very beautiful and I didn't know if "new" was referring to a future that has yet to come.

99 Art : which part are you going to take charge this time ? Could you please tell us those exhibitions you are gong to curate in a general idea?

Eleonora：I am curating the international section with around 30 artists from 20 different countries. I have been asked to give a general vision of international contemporary art and to select artists working with different media (video, photo, painting, sculpture, installation...) and at different points of their career.

99 Art : In your “OTHERNESS ”,you quoted one sentence from Eduardo Galeano who just passed away this year,which said “In the history of humankind, every act of destruction finds its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.” so , how do you think about these words?

Eleonora：I think that this is a positive way to survive at our present and to look at the future. We need to stop, to understand which historical moment we are living in and to create a better future, as the phoenix that reborn from the ashes. And art, as culture, is a wonderful instrument of creation and redemption.

99 Art : As you pointed in your “OTHERNESS”, people seldom feel freedom in today’s globalization. Whether this felling contrary to the ideal “new world” of humankind or not ?how to balance this kind of division ? What do you think ?

Eleonora：I believe that in art and in daily life we need to respect the "other", the specific unicity of each person and artist, because "otherness" is the origin of beauty, of new. We need to be curious and to let us to be enriched by what it is different to us.

99 Art : How do you distinguish the “otherness”and the “exclusiveness” ? Here ,This word “otherness” represents for what ?The minority、 the fringe or something else?

Eleonora：For me "otherness" represent the uniqueness, the singularity. It is a manifesto of freedom, any single person is unique and has the right to express him/herself. Each artist bring a message, an idea, that is personal and unique. And we can learn a lot from listening to the others.

99 Art : There are many sensitive topics in your “OTHERNESS ”,such as homosexuality, sex abuses, racism, bad politics, wars, massacres, the mistreatment of weak people, consumerism, speculation, corruption ,etc. These are the real world ? Are you interested in exposing the reality or truth ?

Eleonora：These are different aspects of the world, they exist and we can not ignore them. To ignore and to hide them is an act of cowardice. What is the difference between reality and truth?

99 Art ： Nowadays, art has increasingly become a symbol of “Refined Culture”and “status symbol”.what do you think we need to introspect ourselves ?

Eleonora：The possession of art is a status symbol, but art as a message and as something to enjoy is democratic and for everybody. We are showing, producing, looking at art, not only buying and selling.

99 Art : After years of rapid economic development , Chinese art has successfully integrated with those art forms in a short time ,such as Western Modernism ,Postmodernism,etc. What do you think we are missing in this process ? In your opinion, how to absorb and transform is correct ?

Eleonora：There is nothing correct or not correct in art. Art needs to be free. I am really fascinated in contamination and exchanges. Art moves between the local and the global, it is a single voice and a choir at the same time. Every artist is a single person but is also part a community, we are influenced by the place where we live or we are born but also by the fact that we are connected to the rest of the world.

99 Art : what do you think about your job? I mean ,working as a curator. I wonder that whether Curating exhibition plays a vital part in your career planning or not ? compared with china’s exhibition system, what is the difference between Chinese and Western do you think ?

Eleonora：It is many years that I am working as curator. I am Italian, I spent six years in China and three in Spain. I love my job and especially the fact that every day I can learn something new. I think that nowadays the art community is universal and international and at a high and professional level art system had absorbed common rules. Art gives us the opportunity to break barriers and frontiers and to be more opened to the others.

编辑：丁晓洁

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