From July to September 2023, the PAC di Milano will present the Summer 2023 edition of PERFORMING PAC. Dance Me To The End Of Love, dedicated to the relationship between contemporary art and historical memory. On the occasion of the 30th year since the Mafia massacre in Via Palestro, the exhibition's idea has been to tell - through videos, photographs, installations, performances and a small "flashback" exhibition with material from the PAC Archive - how contemporary artistic practice and research has treated memory not as knowledge of history as an end in itself, but as a significantly and emotionally charged connection experienced between subjects and events that transcend their singularity.
For this new edition of Performing PAC, we start with a rereading of Christian Boltanski's exhibition, ULTIME NOTIZIE. Christian Boltanski, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the PAC in 2005. One of the main keys to interpreting Boltanski's work is precisely the analysis of the concept of "time", which inexorably flows and in which memory and remembrance become the signs, the traces, of man's fragile and unstable passage.
This year's title, Dance Me To The End Of Love, is a quotation from a song by Leonard Cohen del 1984, from 1984, a song inspired by the drama of the Shoah, but which remembers - aside of the drama - how the salvific and peaceful mission of art is a vehicle of memory, capable of being stronger than any cruelty.
In an interview Cohen explained: 'The song came about by hearing the stories of survivors from the death camps. Next to the crematoria, in some concentration camps, a string quartet was forced to play while this horror unfolded. A horror that would also become the fate of the musicians themselves. They played when their comrades died'.
Artists exhibited:
Maja Bajevic, Yael Bartana, Christian Boltanski, Maurizio Cattelan, Clemencia Echeverri, Miguel Gomes, Douglas Gordon, Ottonella Mocellin e Nicola Pellegrini, Giulio Squillacciotti.
Installation views. Courtesy PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea. Photos Nico Covre, Vulcano Agency
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Performing PAC
Dance me to the end of love
INFO
PAC | Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan
11 July - 10 September 2023
Timetable
July:
Tuesday - Sunday: 10.00 – 19.30
Thursday: 10.00 - 22.30
August and September:
Tuesday - Sunday: 12.00 – 19.30
Thursday: 12.00 - 22.30
Closed on Mondays
Last entry 1 hour before closing