PRATO.- On Thursday April 18, the Centro Pecci will inaugurate two new exhibition projects: Wiltshire Before Christ, which stems from a collaboration between the artist Jeremy Deller, the streetwear brand Aries and the fashion photographer David Sims, and Tomorrow Is the Question, which presents three works by Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist known internationally for actively involving the public in his projects.

This programme continues the approach defined by the new management of Cristiana Perrella, who joined Centro Pecci one year ago, open to multiple languages and viewpoints, which sees the museum as a place that welcomes production, debate and cultural promotion and is committed to artistic research in the broadest sense of the term, between visual art, design and fashion, performance and theatre, with a particular focus on music.

The project Wiltshire Before Christ stems from the collaboration between the artist Jeremy Deller, the streetwear brand Aries and the fashion photographer David Sims, who worked to create an exhibition of a capsule collection of clothes and a book, starting with the many suggestions offered by the most famous and mysterious prehistoric site in the world: Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, UK, the oldest part of which dates back to 3.000 BC.

Having entered the collective imagination and become a mass tourism destination, Stonehenge is a founding place for British identity and culture. This is why it has already been the subject of a work by Jeremy Deller, an artist highly interested in themes regarding popular culture, manifestations of folklore and mass culture. Indeed, in 2012 Deller created Sacrilege, an installation that reproduced the archaeological site on a 1:1 scale in the form of inflatable structures where children could play, turning it into an attraction worthy of Luna Park.

With Wiltshire Before Christ Deller instead restores magic and mystery to the enormous stones of Stonehenge, investigating, through reference to a more remote ancient symbol, the pull exerted on humans over thousands of years by the themes of mysticism and pagan symbolism, and the profoundness of concepts of identity, time and place, but still managing to mix them up with pop culture.

“Stonehenge could be the greatest logo or trademark in the whole world. The silhouette is so recognisable — it probably has more recognition than almost anything in Britain short of the Queen,” claims the artist.

In addition to producing a video and installations, Deller, inspired by Sofia Prantera – the creative mind of the Aries brand - also took on the production of objects and items of clothing inspired by the archaeology, presented in the exhibition as relics of a distant past, creating a short circuit between eras and languages. The shots by David Sims, which see Stonehenge and Avebury as the set of a fashion shoot, reproduced in the exhibition on large lightboxes, further blur the boundaries between the past and the present. “It’s an unusual exhibition,” says Deller, “I almost worked as a set designer, it was more a question of creating an atmosphere… and it was essentially a collective work, with Sofia and David.”

Through an immersive exhibition path that sees different artistic and creative approaches repeatedly encroaching on each other, Wiltshire Before Christ combines art, photography and fashion in an innovative project, which is complex to define and beyond the realms of what is normally presented in a museum institute, mixing up presumed cultural hierarchies.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, a genuine guide to the Neolithic sites of Great Britain, with an introduction by the famous archaeologist Julian Richards, aerial maps of the sites, together with images of ancient local structures and photographs taken by David Sims. The publication Wiltshire Before Christ will be available online on www.ideabooks.com, www.ariesarise.com, and at Centro Pecci.

Defined by the Scottish critic Mark Brown as the "Pied Piper of popular culture" for his political and social research, Jeremy Deller (London, UK, 1966) is a conceptual artist who works with different media such as video, installations and music, often involving other people in the creative process. His most known works include The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of the great clash between the police and protesters during the English miner strikes in 1984.

In 2004 Deller won the Turner Prize, and in 2013 he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale with the project English Magic, which reflected on the roots of British society, its people, myths, folklore, and its cultural and political history, interweaving events from the past and present with an imaginary future in an almost psychedelic narration. At the Centro Pecci in November 2018, Deller presented the video Everybody in The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2018) within the artist’ film series Second Summer of Love.

Aries is a streetwear project by the duo Sofia Prantera and Fergus Purcell, which unites allusions to the most famous fashion brands with youth anti-fashion movements and points of reference of the underground culture, revealing a return to the sensibilities of the 1980s. Sofia Prantera, Italian, who trained at Central St Martins in the mid-Nineties, was a candidate at the 2018 British Fashion Awards in the British Emerging Talent Womenswear section. The capsule collection of 30 WB4C pieces, available in limited edition, stems from the collaboration between Aries and Jeremy Deller. Presented as part of the exhibition, the collection will be also available at Centro Pecci.

David Sims (Sheffield, UK, 1966) is a famous English fashion photographer. He has collaborated with the most important magazines in the sector, such as Vogue, Wmagazine, Dazed & Confused, and he has overseen the campaigns of numerous brands, including Pepsi, Gap, Prada, Helmut Lang, Yohji Yamamoto, Levis, Louis Vuitton, Jil Sander, Hugo Boss, Rimmel, Givenchy, BCBG and Nike.

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA. TOMORROW IS THE QUESTION
curated by Camilla Mozzato 04.19 – 08.25.2019
Tomorrow Is the Question is the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum by Rirkrit Tiravanija (Buenos Aires, 1961), one of the most influential artists of his generation, known internationally for works that bring real life inside the spaces of art, achieved by the active intervention of the public and breaking down all barriers between the object and spectator. The exhibition at the Centro Pecci brings together three projects by the artist on the idea of the future and the need to question the fate of our planet and of humanity. Tomorrow Is the Question, the large installation after which the exhibition is named, resurrects Ping Pong Society, a project by the Slovak artist Július Koller (1939-2007) presented for the first time in Bratislava in 1970. Koller installed ping-pong tables in an exhibition space and invited visitors to play. The aim was to involve and inspire people to move towards new opportunities for active thought, in this case aimed at reflection on the environment and cultural context. Retracing Koller's tracks, Tiravanija fills one of the rooms in the museum with ping pong tables, which are available to visitors, emblazoned with the text: “Tomorrow is the question.” Inviting the public, who usually play a passive role, to become an active part of the exhibition by playing or encouraging others who are playing, Tiravanija, in his subtle and playful way, places human relations, exchange and participation at the heart of the “question about the future.”

A work by Koller is also the inspiration for the second work presented at Centro Pecci, Untitled (Remember JK, Universal Futurological Question Mark U. F. O.), a photograph of a group of people arranged to form a large question mark in the Carceri square of Prato. This is in fact the re-staging of Universal Futurological Question Mark [U.F.O.], which Koller created in 1978, a photograph of a group of children in uniform forming a question mark on the side of a small hill. Tiravanija's remake contextualises Koller's work in a here and now that inevitably relates it to the present day which concerns us most, recalling the value of doubt and of asking questions about what is happening around us, but also inviting reflection on the relationship between the individual and the mass.

Tiravanija's last work in Prato is Fear Eats the Soul, the large flag that waves in front of the museum entrance. Produced for the Creative Time Pledges of Allegiance project, which required artists to come up with a design for a flag in the spirit of political resistance, Tiravanija's work recalls the title of the film by Rainer W. Fassbinder Angst essen Seele auf, which tells of the difficult love story between a German cleaner and a Moroccan mechanic, a relationship that brings out their deepest fears as much as the xenophobia and racism surrounding them. The work can be considered a manifesto, a programmatic enunciation valid for all of Rirkrit Tiravanija's work, which is an act of faith in the meaning of human relationships, reception, closeness to the other, like values that give meaning to our life and our future.

The son of a Thai diplomat, Rirkrit Tiravanija (Buenos Aires, 1961) has lived in many countries and completed his studies at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, the Banff Center School of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and finally the Independent Study Program at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. An exponent of the most representative of what Nicolas Bourriaud has defined as relational aesthetics, with explicit references to the conceptual and avant-garde trends of the Sixties and Seventies such as Fluxus, Tiravanija implements his work process of sharing, meeting and interaction with the public, often using daily activities such as cooking and consuming food together. Tiravanija has attended the Venice Biennale with his work several times and he has exhibited in the main international museums including the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Palais de Tokyo. In 2005 he won the Hugo Boss Prize.