Alphabets of the Contemporary
37 artworks / 18 artists
from the permanent MAXXI collection
"The letters were born instinctively, freeing themselves from the cage of my alphabetisation based on Latin characters".
This is how the artist Luigi Serafini clarifies the enigma of his Codex Seraphinianus (1981), a veritable encyclopaedia, made up of images and words, written according to an indecipherable alphabet, completely reinvented, an 'asemic' script, i.e. emptied of its semantic content, which becomes pure sign, a form potentially open to new contents and meanings. The annulment of an alphabet, of a shared and standardized code, destabilizes the person reading, who finds himself deprived of an essential interpretative tool, of access to knowledge, making him 'illiterate', but at the same time predisposes him to relearn a new language, embracing the potential of 'not knowing' and recognizing the bottlenecks within which one is constrained when adopting a single key to reading the world, a univocal and self-referential alphabet.
This is how the artist Luigi Serafini clarifies the enigma of his Codex Seraphinianus (1981), a veritable encyclopaedia, made up of images and words, written according to an indecipherable alphabet, completely reinvented, an 'asemic' script, i.e. emptied of its semantic content, which becomes pure sign, a form potentially open to new contents and meanings. The annulment of an alphabet, of a shared and standardized code, destabilizes the person reading, who finds himself deprived of an essential interpretative tool, of access to knowledge, making him 'illiterate', but at the same time predisposes him to relearn a new language, embracing the potential of 'not knowing' and recognizing the bottlenecks within which one is constrained when adopting a single key to reading the world, a univocal and self-referential alphabet.
The exhibition Alphabets of the Contemporary takes the concept of "alphabet" as a starting metaphor, and sets out to explore the processes of construction and deconstruction, the encounter and clash of "new alphabets" - verbal and non-verbal - in the world of contemporary art. The exhibition's reflection is developed by exploring a series of Italian and international artistic positions in the MAXXI Arte ed Architettura Collection, from the 1960s to the present day, and traverses thematic nodes, hybrid and in dialogue with each other: alphabets, codes, and erasures; glances between alphabets; (auto)biographical alphabets; media alphabets; spiritual alphabets; social, identity and environmental alphabets.
Pursuing the question: what happens when positions, works, and stories born from different 'alphabets' meet each other? The exhibition does not claim to achieve a monolithic answer, but rather aspires to highlight the value of understanding and sharing different alphabets.
Pursuing the question: what happens when positions, works, and stories born from different 'alphabets' meet each other? The exhibition does not claim to achieve a monolithic answer, but rather aspires to highlight the value of understanding and sharing different alphabets.
THEMATIC KNOTS
* alphabets, codes, and erasures
* glances between alphabets
* (auto)biographical alphabets
* media alphabets
* spiritual alphabets
* social, identity, environmental alphabets
* alphabets, codes, and erasures
* glances between alphabets
* (auto)biographical alphabets
* media alphabets
* spiritual alphabets
* social, identity, environmental alphabets
