DUETS (BLACK POSTERS)

Off-site project

Artists: Santiago Sierra, Fani Zguro
Installation date: 21.03.2025
Locations: Kato Petralona, Athens

“Duets” is a project by Fani Zguro. In each exhibition he invites another artist to exhibit together with him. In this collaboration with Closing Soon in Athens, Santiago Sierra and Fani Zguro present a site-specific series of “Black Posters” installed in different areas of the city. Referring to the response of Leonardo Sciascia in his Black on Black to the banal accusation of pessimism, offering us “black writing on the black page of reality,” the game of double blackness in this project is played with the “Black Posters” of Santiago Sierra (a work the artist has presented in a number of cities since 2008). Sierra establishes a powerful counterpoint to the advertising messages omnipresent in public space, namely by installing black posters on a massive scale, over the series of “From What is Before” by Fani Zguro (black drawings in ink on various pages of books. The new DUETS (Black Posters) delves into the version of total anarchy in an ideal bond with the constant expansion of cronaca nera (crime news).

Santiago Sierra was born in Madrid (Spain) in 1966, where he still lives and works. After graduating in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, Santiago Sierra completed his artistic training in Hamburg, where he studied under professors F. E. Walter, S. Brown and B. J. Blume. His beginnings are linked to the alternative artistic circuits of the Spanish capital - El Ojo Atómico, Espacio P - although he will continue to develop most of his career in Mexico (1995-2006) and in Italy (2006-2010). His work has always had a great influence on literature and art criticism. Sierra’s work seeks to reveal the perverse networks of power that inspire the alienation and exploitation of workers, the injustice of labor relations, the unequal distribution of wealth produced by capitalism, the deviance of work and money, racial discrimination in a world marked by unidirectional migratory flows (south-north). By revisiting and reworking some strategies that characterize the minimalist, conceptual and performative art of the Sixties and of the Seventies, Sierra interrupts the flows of capital and goods (Obstruction of Freeway With a Truck’s Trailer, 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009); he hires workers to reveal their precarious conditions (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold); he explores the mechanisms of racial segregation derived from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002; Economical Study of The Skin of Caracans, 2006); and he refutes the stories that legitimize a democracy based on state violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq Facing the Corner, 2010-2012; Los encargados, 2012). In 2010, he received the Spanish National Award for Plastic Arts but he publicly rejected it by claiming his independence from a state which shows “contempt for the mandate to work for the common good”. In 2018, Sierra included a portrait of Carles Puigdemont into the exhibition “Contemporary Spanish Political Prisoners”, in Madrid. It was ordered to be removed on February 23, 2018. In 2020, Sierra invited First Nations peoples, from places colonized by the British empire, to donate blood for the artwork Union Flag; the “Dark Mofo” festival cancelled plans to show the work after a backlash led by Indigenous Australian artists.

Fani Zguro was born in 1977 in Tirana. Lives and works in Tirana and Milan. Zguro has been graduated at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan (1998–2007). In 2007 he won the International Onufri Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana; in 2016 the International Mulliqi Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Kosovo in Pristina; the Best Video-Art award assigned by TIFF Tirana and in 2021 Award TOP7 Gallery of ArtVilnius21. Zguro also curated the 14th International Onufri Prize at National Gallery of Arts in Tirana (2016) and in 2017 he was part of the AiR program at Q21 - Museums Quartier in Vienna and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2003–2004). Since 2015 he is part of NYC apexart’s jury. His work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée Marseille, Filmoteca Espanola Madrid, Photo Museum Braunschweig, Ost Anders Festival Nuremberg, Triënnale Kortrijk, 2nd Tirana Biennale, 3rd Mardin Biennial, 4th Young Artists Biennial of Bucharest, 6th Wrong Biennale, 6th Çanakkale Biennial, 7th Edition of the Black-and-White Biennial in Satu Mare, 13th Biennale of Cairo, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Belvedere 21 - Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Vienna, Palais Populaire Berlin, the New York Public Library and Centre Pompidou Paris.

Photos: Jason Faulter