Sonic Youth Pavilion

The installation that is simultaneously a sculpture, an architectural element and an exhibition, was conceived and created by the artist in 2008 specifically for Museion, as an integral part of the exhibition “Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix”. The space / work conceived by Graham, now positioned on the ground floor of Museion, is a pavilion structure made of semi-reflective glass and mirrors with perforated stainless-steel walls. Visitors can enter this permeable environment and can observe the outside world while being observed themselves.

The pavilion, which belongs to the museum collection is a one-off creation, designed by the artist to be not only a piece of architecture but also a display space for multimedia material. It contains several video stations that the visitor can interact with. During the exhibition, the work will house two separate moments in the Passage program, designed to analyze the medium of video as an all-round tool of artistic investigation.

The first moment (17.03 – 04.06) entitled My Bolzano. Views of the City is dedicated to a collaboration project between Museion and ZeLIG - the School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano. Inside the pavilion, four video stations house the first documentary exercises of first-year students that focus on the city and its inhabitants as well as the development of a personal creative style. In this way, the pavilion becomes a kind of window onto the activity of the institute and on the first processes of vision and storytelling through video.

My Bolzano, the title of these productions, recounts an intimate and young relationship with the city and the medium of the camera. Housed inside Dan Graham’s work, these different views establish a symbolic conversation with the urban spaces that can be seen through the transparency of the pavilion and the architecture of the museum itself.

The second moment, titled Time Frame (09.06 – 03.09) and curated by the Turin-based writer and curator Saim Demircan, is dedicated to artists who have experimented with film and video as a means to document exhibitions. Whether developing specific filming techniques or editing footage, these structural, collaborative and subjective approaches sit midway between artwork and document.