ART CITIES: Milan-Adrian Paci

Adrian Paci Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo, Exhibition view Mudec-Milan, 2024, Photo: Sara Rizzo, Courtesy the artist and MudecAdrian Paci is known primarily for his work in performance and video, although he explores similar subjects in painting, photography, and sculpture. Characterized by a fluid interplay between performance and body art, his videos frequently focus on quotidian existence and feature members of his own family. Paci’s position as an exile holds a central place in his oeuvre. His work frequently addresses themes of geographical separation, nostalgia, and memory, and conveys a keen sense of the mutability of life and art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MUDEC Archive

Adrian Paci Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo, Exhibition view Mudec-Milan, 2024, Photo: Sara Rizzo, Courtesy the artist and Mudec
Adrian Paci Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo, Exhibition view Mudec-Milan, 2024, Photo: Sara Rizzo, Courtesy the artist and Mudec

Adrian Paci left his native country of Albania in 1997 during the turbulent times of political uncertainty and instability. Since then, his self-referential work unfolds the narrative of displacement and loss; often reflecting on the migrant’s trauma of separation and nostalgia. From the innocence of childhood towards the social initiation and down to a mature voice of a political resonance, Paci paints the landscape of an ethical subject at the moment of becoming and transition. His oeuvre is an anatomy of political desire: from an account of dispossession and exile through a ritual of belonging and identification down to the mechanics of self-empowerment and emancipation. His films, drawings and paintings often overlap imagination and fantasy with the cruelty of political reality and the harshness of everyday life. “Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo” [Your sky was sea, your sea was sky] is Adrian Paci’s site-specific installation MUDEC’s Agora. The installation transforms the space of the Agora with a mosaic of blue-green hues that refer to the colors of the sea. Each fragment of this seemingly abstract composition is actually a detail taken from photographs published in newspaper articles about migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Inspired by his own personal experience, and starting from the end of the Soviet bloc to the present day, Adrian Paci searches through Italian and international newspapers to create a necessarily partial archive of the tragedies that befall those who seek emancipation through exile and often find death instead.The artist does not show us the disaster, nor the drowned and the saved, he chooses the detail that unites all the stories told, sometimes the subject of the photograph, sometimes relegated to the background: the sea. The cutouts made by the artist isolate a poetic detail from a dramatic image, showing out of scale the rough, grainy rendering of the printed paper, where the screen is deliberately made visible, a distinctive feature of the composition. The mosaic technique, dear to the artist’s heart since his training, is applied here to the modular rectangles of the stained glass windows of the Agora, covered with thin, transparent printed films through which atmospheric light passes. The succession of tones, darker in the lower bands and lighter in the upper ones, combined with the variations of light and shade that naturally accompany the agora throughout the day, transform this space – whose organic shape itself recalls a wave – into the backdrop of an artificial sea: an aquarium. Paci’s installation can be compared to panoramas, the large circular paintings that were popular in Europe in the 19th century. This time, however, the immersive space documents not a real landscape but a political one, composed of 250 tiles that testify to the quest for freedom, the harshness of reality and the ethical reflection of which we are all a part.

Photo: Adrian Paci Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo, Exhibition view Mudec-Milan, 2024, Photo: Sara Rizzo, Courtesy the artist and Mudec

Info: Curators: Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo, Mudec – Museo delle Culture, Via Tortona 56, Milan, Italy, Duration: 27/11/2024-21/9/2025, Days & Hours: Mon 14:30-19:30, Tue-Wed, Fri & Sun 9:30-19:30, Thu & Sat 9:30-22:30, www.mudec.it/

Adrian Paci Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo, Exhibition view Mudec-Milan, 2024, Photo: Sara Rizzo, Courtesy the artist and Mudec
Adrian Paci Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu Cielo, Exhibition view Mudec-Milan, 2024, Photo: Sara Rizzo, Courtesy the artist and Mudec