Curated by Irene Calderoni

Press Play presents the artist’s point of view when exploring the language ofthe media, a world saturated with virtual images in which reality seeminglycoincides with its mass-mediatic representation. The chance to accessinformation live 24/7 emphasises the dimensions of immediacy, speed andflow, a consequence of reality that makes the perception and interpretationof events more complex. Our knowledge of the facts passes through thepowerful filters of the mass media, where newsworthy stories are selected anddetermined internally, and packaged like consumer products to be marketedand sold to the widest possible public.Therefore, information becomes a form of entertainment, a performancedominated by episodes of fear and conflict, violence and excess hand-pickedby the media for their newsworthiness. Catastrophe has become a highlysuccessful product, whether it comes out of Hollywood or the news, and in thisglobal theatre where wars and terrorist attacks are staged, there is certainlyno shortage of raw material. The arrival of the Internet, celebrated by mediagurus as an instrument that would bring more democracy and freedom ofspeech, has in actual fact brought about new cause for anxiety with regards tothe reliability of its sources and the manipulation of information. New conceptssuch as citizen journalism and crowdsourcing implicate a redefinition of therole of the spectator as an active agent of production and content, which atthe same time causes major problems for traditional journalists and the worldof professional journalism as a whole.In this context, art can become a critical tool, able to analyse the political andsocial role of the images used in constructing our personal and collectiveunderstanding of reality. The artists in the exhibition challenge the media bytaking possession of content and turning it around to reveal its functionalmechanisms. By assembling, storing, rearranging and falsifying content, withan air of irony, absurdity and hyperrealism, the artists – either with detachedobjectiveness or direct criticism – offer their own take on the many ways thatthe contemporary world is presented to us in the pages of newspapers, on ourtelevision and computer screens day after day.Artists in the showBani Abidi, Black Audio Film Collective, Thomas Demand, Hans-PeterFeldmann, Alessandro Gagliardo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe,Jon Kessler, Steve McQueen, Alessandro Quaranta, Katya Sander, DoronSolomons, Thomas Struth, Fiona Tan, Artur Zmjiewski.

Media partner: La Stampa, Wired, Tv Talk (Rai Educazione)