People and the City sets out to undertake a journey through a range of different themes that have characterised the relationship between the city and its inhabitants since the very beginning of the 20th century and does so through paintings, photographs, installations and videos from the various collections of the UniCredit Group, from Italy to Germany, from Austria to Turkey and Russia. Thus, the exhibition presents man’s relationship with urban space – space to be understood in both the geographical and mental sense – the city as the setting of transformation, contamination, an organism in a constant state of change, where history lives side by side with the imagination of the future. In order to understand the city we need to get to know its inhabitants, see them in action, identify the similarities and differences among those who belong to the urban community.
Ever since ancient times, the city has played a central role in the imagery of humanity. The city is the stage for modern living par excellence, and it is no coincidence that it also constituted one of the canonical loci of intellectual and artistic reflection throughout the 20th century. The city has embodied the spirit as well as the contradictions of modernity. It was looked upon as a Moloch capable of devouring its own inhabitants or as the place in which any hope could be given the chance to shine; the backdrop to both our worst nightmares and our wildest dreams.
A city in which the very concepts of the centre and outskirts are constantly changin, in the ongoing process of broadening its limits: the overall vision of a city gives rise to extraordinarily evocative images. The city is the place where everything happens, or at least where anything might happen: work and entertainment, culture and sport, every moment of the day may be filled; the city is an enormous container inside which the individual or the group find themselves performing on the stage of a show unfolding right before their eyes.
CATALOGUE
Edited by
Walter Guadagnini
Catalogue texts
Walter Guadagnini
Bärbel Kopplin
Entries by
Claudia Amadio
Evelyn Benesch
Heike Eipeldauer
Silvia Ferrari
Zita Kranz
Lisa Kreil
Francesca Pagliuca
Lisa Reith
Lillian Schultz-Naumann
Florian Steininger
Editing by
Larisa Kazaryan
Translations
English/Polish: Aleksandra Jakubczak, Monika Ujma
German/English: Caroline Hörl, Abigail Prohaska
Italian/English: Ben Bazalgette
Proofreading
Elena Lazareva (Eng.)
Paweł Falkowski (Pl)
Katarzyna Radomska (Pl)
Design
Anna Hegman, K+S
Grzegorz Laszuk, K+S
Typesetting
Marcin Treichel
Lenders and Copyright
UniCredit S.p.A.
UniCredit Bank AG (HypoVereinsbank – Member of UniCredit)
UniCredit Bank Austria AG
Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık A.Ş.
Cover
Jordi Colomer, En la pampa (Pink bag, Różowa torba), 2008
Photo:
Courtesy of Gallery Traversée, Munich
© VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2011
Publisher
Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu
Ul. Wały Gen. Sikorskiego 13, 87-100 Toruń
Poland
www.csw.torun.pl
info@csw.torun.pl
© Authors of the texts
© Art Collection UniCredit
© 2012 Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu
All rights reserved
Printed by
Artis Poligrafia
ISBN: 978-83-62881-07-9
Tags: catalogues, publi