The exhibition ‘MIRRORS/ESPELLOS’, curated by Italian curator Gyonata Bonvicini, corresponds to the proposal selected in the 2nd call of MARCO Award for Young Curators, chosen as the winning project. Precisely, the starting up of this exhibition, which is taking place at the same time as the next call is still open, until October 30th, — this edition organised jointly between MARCO and FRAC Lorraine, France. From an institution like MARCO, the award is designed to promote the work and ideas of young curators, who are offered the opportunity to develop and execute their ideas in a museum setting. In return, candidates must present collective exhibition projects, i.e. they must take into account two or more artists, and bear in mind contemporary artistic creation at all times.

‘MIRRORS/ESPELLOS’ brings together experimental works by eleven artists who share the same attitude before images. Starting from the power of mirrors’ ability to disrupt time and space, this project shows works in diverse range of media — photographs, videos, installations, collages, sculptures, sound installations, performances — that focus on themes such as repetition, reflection and reappropriation of culture. The project has taken deeply into account the peculiarities of the exhibition space and the ways in which physical reality is defined: just as a mirror draws on properties and on the form of a surface, its content is necessarily constantly changing.

The idea of the mirror and its complex theoretical and visual layers can be seen as a topic general enough to allow a dually functional concrete context: on the one hand, the ability to strengthen the semi-autonomous presence of the single works and, on the other, to allow the viewer to experience the works as they relate to one another and within the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Taking as a reference the museum space itself — an model of the radial Panopticon, that can be viewed in different ways and from various points of view — the exhibition architecture presents an overview but allows for through-views, thereby creating a number of particular connections between works and artists. The exhibition layout is not divided into distinct sections, but there are different starting points for the development of loose “groups”, which in turn also refer to one another.

Micol Assaël and Maya Deren, so generationally far away, share a similar attitude before repetition and obsession, playing with the idea of a parallel dimension hidden behind an illusionary threshold, and giving rise to endless tensions between illusion and meaning. Dan Graham investigates the relationship between people and architecture and the psychological effects of reflecting and transparent surfaces, and Falke Pisano, artist and writer, examines the way structures, materials, and colours determine human behaviour. Ryan Gander makes use of everyday experience and collective consciousness as the substance of his projects, whilst Giuseppe Gabellone recreates and intervenes in formal phenomena as a way of investigating perception. Isa Genzken and Oscar Tuazon reveal a similar attitude in the development of their works, with a constructive interpretation of discarded things, while also incorporating the very process of transformation into the work. Reflective surfaces are a constant in Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s complex visual language, facing the peculiarity of the surrounding space, just as the perfect monochromes polished in some works by Kitty Kraus. On her side, Susan Philipsz, best known for her numerous audio works, contributes to the exhibition with her rendition of Long Gone, the elegiac Syd Barrett song, thanks to two loudspeakers located at the museum’s façade.

The title of this exhibition takes inspiration from “Mirror, Mirror”, an episode of the classic science fiction series Star Trek, which introduces the alternate reality “Mirror Universe”, where the expansion of narrative scenarios creates a series of labyrinthine passageways, that require the viewer, through interpretation, to make order out of chaos.

In the curator’s words, “the point has often been made that art deals with the replication of reality. There is a profound significance in the ancient legends that tell how rhyme was born from echo, and drawing from an outlined shadow. But the magic function of objects such as mirrors — which create another world similar to the one being reflected, yet not the same, an ‘as if’ world — is just as significant for the self-awareness of art as the metaphors of reflection and the mirror image.”