Aug. 7 – The Maramotti Collection of Reggio Emilia is bringing two installations by Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen, to China. From tomorrow to October 7, the K11 gallery in Shanghai will host the installation “Are We Still Going On?” commissioned by the Maramotti Collection and designed by the artist for Max Mara’s former clothing factory (now headquarters of the Collection). This space was redrawn as an inhabited place that looks like a ship’s hull, sectioned into two parts separated from the ceiling to the floor in the same compositional and semicircular rhythm, made by shirts knotted together suggesting a dialogue between male and female, past and present. Also on show is a video made in 2012 by Beatrice Brands, Italian filmmaker, during the ten-day production of the art piece at the Maramotti Collection. The other installation on show in Shanghai, “From Generation to Generation,” looks like a big skeleton in which the sequence of plastic jackets clearly alludes to the passing of time. Since the end of the eighties, men’s jackets used are a central element in the work of Kaarina Kaikkonen; their choice is a means of expression linked to the death of her father, when the artist was ten: wearing her father’s clothes at the time represented a desperate attempt to extend his presence, but over the years their artistic elaboration became a catharsis that, starting from a biographical episode, embraced a wider reflection on separation and loss.
