The exhibition presents four large-format poster works that advertise a circus that seems to be called “Un Mondo Che Muore”. The hand screen prints were created especially for Knust Kunz Gallery Editions and are being shown for the first time in a specially designed installation. The motifs of the poster works were created in 2022 for an exhibition to mark the 100th birthday of Pier Poalo Pasolini at the MACRO (Rome). Olaf Nicolai had been invited to respond artistically to a television interview that Pasolini had conducted with the poet Ezra Pound in 1967. Nicolai takes up the ambivalent impression of an intellectual and at the same time circus-like play, that the interview had on him. He translates this atmosphere into a typographic production, for which he also wrote a short text about two clowns. The work is extended in the exhibition by the installation of a mini-manege in which the interview of the two “actors” can be followed. Two other rooms present archive material that vividly illustrates the importance of aesthetic articulation in the staging and communication of ideological positions. Alongside material, which documents how the conversation between Pasolini and Pound was carefully scripted and staged, photographs of scenes and the set design, taken during the shooting of Pasolini’s last film, Salò, are shown in the third room. The surprising constellation of an interview between Pound – an important poet of the avant-garde, who was also a staunch defender of Benito Mussolini – and Pasolini, a radical critic of the continued existence of fascism in contemporary Italy, forms the starting point of a conversation between the art historian Stefano Chiodi (Rome), the Silvia De Laude (Milan), editor of Pasolini’s writings, and Olaf Nicolai. An artists’ publication conceived by Olaf Nicolai will be published, which Till Gathmann (Berlin) designed in collaboration with Olaf Nicolai.
Olaf Nicolai: Un Mondo Che Muore
Sep 6 – Oct 15, 2024
Knust Kunz Gallery Editions
Munich, Germany
