Fondazione Prada, Milan
February 2018
Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, conceived and curated by Germano Celant, is an exhibition that explores the world of art and culture in Italy in the interwar years. Based on documentary and photographic evidence of the time, it reconstructs the spatial, temporal, social, and political contexts in which the works of art were created and exhibited, and the way in which they were interpreted and received by the public of the time.
The investigation was carried out in partnership with archives, foundations, museums, libraries, and private collections and has resulted in the selection of more than six hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, posters, pieces of furniture, and architectural plans and models created by over one hundred authors. In Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, these objects are displayed with period images, original publications, letters, magazines, press clippings, and private photographs—for a total of eight hundred documents—in order to question, as explained by Germano Celant, “the idealism in exhibitions, where works of art, either in museums or other institutions, are displayed in an anonymous, monochromatic environment, generally on a white surface, to connect them to period photographic testimony and reinsert them in their original historical communication space.”
The exhibition provides an immersive experience consisting of twenty-four partial reconstructions of public and private exhibition rooms. These full-size recreations from period photographs contain original works by artists such as Giorgio Morandi as well as Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Filippo de Pisis, Arturo Martini, Fausto Melotti, Scipione, Gino Severini, Mario Sironi, Arturo Tosi, and Adolfo Wildt, among others.
Exhibition catalogue