My Gem Or Lab Hell. About home gallery's concept

Stefano W. Pasquini e Mustafa Sabbagh

curated by Massimo Marchetti

Intoduction

"My Gem Or Lab Hell" is the title of double exhibition with Stefano W. Pasquini and Mustafa Sabbagh, curated by Massimo Marchetti.
Usually there is no opportunity for dialogue between a "gem" and a "infernal laboratory". And yet this juxtaposition of foreign realities finds its own reason for being exactly in the place that hosts it, in the letters that make up its name and which can be reconfigured as the elements of an exhibition: the title is the anagram of MLB home gallery.
The case, as Dadaism teaches, is revealing. In fact, the same house-gallery is an oxymoron because it is evident that the challenge to solve the dualism between public and private in one single identity is resolved in a singular reality: a place built on the sense of hospitality and the production of empathy. In the visitor, the sensation of accessing something as precious as a gem is progressively superimposed on being involved in such an incessant and pervasive dynamism that it becomes a guest of the mythological forge of Vulcano.
From the early 2000s the artistic paths of Stefano W. Pasquini and Mustafa Sabbagh have had the opportunity to cross each other in several group exhibitions and in the pages of an art magazine, but his is the first time that a direct comparison takes place between different poetics that are approached in the political feature of the gaze on actuality. On the one hand, Pasquini's work presents itself as a series of simple and at the same time violent gestures that pass through several techniques with an anarchic and provocative spirit; on the other hand, Sabbagh's work is mainly expressed in photography and video, “dove l'intensa sofisticazione è funzionale a fare emergere la dimensione sovversiva e perturbante della fisicità.” . The theme of the house-gallery is developed by Pasquini and Sabbagh starting from the dilemma between everyday life and exceptionality to get to provoke unexpected results. It is important to underline that the MLB home gallery has recently crossed the finishing line of its first ten years of activity.
For this particular exhibition the two artists will disseminate their works in unusual spaces. Pasquini will intervene directly on the elements that characterize the domestic side of the home gallery, such as the sofa, the large table, the window doors. the artist realizes a series of assemblages and photographic prints on unusual supports, they originate from the ironic contextualization of absurd sentences at first sight, for example: images from Google, unusual scans of architectural and human details, all traces of the memory of this place and the people passing through it “con le quali si “esporrà” la confluenza tra vita familiare e attività lavorativa in un groviglio di capovolgimenti e duplicazioni.”.
Instead, Sabbagh will present a new version of the video installations “anthro_pop_gonia” where some Greek myths have been dethroned by their divine dimension to interpret the human history of contemporary vices. Gods and demigods will then be convened to a symposium that crush in the various rooms of the house-gallery evoking the atmosphere of a family ritual. At this installation Sabbagh will support a pair of photographic prints of the cycle “sub limen”, one of these works is reworked by Pasquini, a work of an ambiguous nature that embodies the deviant operation put in place by the two artists.
Thanks to these artists the house-gallery will be shown at the same time as a precious jewel and a whirling laboratory, to interrogate both visitors and its inhabitants.