Out of Order | new exhibition at MEET

From Wednesday, June 5, until Sunday, September 8, 2024, the first Italian exhibition of American artist John Sanborn, entitled Out of Order, curated by Maria Grazia Mattei, founder and president of MEET, will be held at MEET Digital Culture Center-the International Center for Digital Art and Culture established in Milan with the support of Fondazione Cariplo and, in 2023, recognized as a museum by Regione Lombardia.

The exhibition itinerary, set up by Migliore+Servetto, unfolds among multimedia installations spanning more than four decades of exploration of sound, music, interactive media, video and artworks that address issues of identity – including gender -, cultural truth, memory and mythologies.
Specifically, in MEET’s immersive room, the artist presents V+M, a site-specific work that makes people think about social issues related to queerness, gender fluidity, and misunderstandings that can generate anger, repression, and exclusion. Here Venus and Mars (hence the title V+M precisely, i.e., Venus plus Mars), reinterpreted in a contemporary key, seem to improvise a dance and question visitors on the issue of gender.

Videos viewable inside cathode ray tube monitors, which present a timeline of the 1970s and 1980s, are flanked by the works: Body Quartets and Mind Quartets, video installations designed to narrate a state of transformation of our Ego; Out of Chaos, with a random sequence of more than 60 stories explored with augmented reality; Mythic Status. The latter is “composed” of four portraits – video and sound portraits – of as many characters (Apollo, Atalanta, Nyx and Hercules), each with its own story; four contemporary deities taking their cues from Greek mythology.

A strong and increasingly necessary message, then, expressed in an exhibition of great quality that not by chance opens in the month of Pride, in a neighborhood – that of Porta di Venezia, where MEET is based – in which inclusiveness and diversity are intrinsic characteristics, as well as themes that the International Center for Digital Art and Culture itself has been dealing with since it was founded.

“Out of Order provides ‘anarchic’ artistic scenarios that activate questions we need to address, welcoming the viewer to participate. Not always to solve our problems, but to face our condition, understand it and ask us to do something to change, starting with ourselves.”