Jan Fabre. My Only Nation is Imagination

On Monday 26 June at 7 p.m., at Studio Trisorio in the Riviera di Chiaia 215, a solo show by Jan Fabre entitled My Only Nation is Imagination curated by Melania Rossi, will be inaugurated. Sculptures, drawings and videos, all part of Fabre’s study of the relationship between art and science, will be on exhibit. 

What is beauty? Who is an artist? How do neurons respond to classical art and what, instead, happens if viewing a work of contemporary art? This and many other questions are the focus of a series of works in which Fabre is spurred into examining the physiological processes which govern artistic creation and enjoyment. The body is central to Fabre’s artistic universe and this exhibit gathers a nucleus of works which delve into the nature of the brain, defined by the artist as “the sexiest part of the human body”. There will also be a showing of the video Do we feel with our brain and think with our heart?, a film-performance in which Fabre engages in a dialogue with Giacomo Rizzolatti, the neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons, which are fundamental in explaining empathy between individuals. The artist creates surprising, sensual and playful associations between the symbols of his art and the objects used in Rizzolatti’s experiments, in a sort of philosophical-aesthetic speculation which explores the circularity between understanding and pleasure and between sensation, emotion and cognition. 

On Thursday 29 June at 6 p.m., the Madre Museum is to inaugurate a temporary showing of Jan Fabre’s iconic sculpture The Man Who Measures the Clouds - American version (18 years older), a paean to man’s ability to continue dreaming, to transcend space and time in his imagination. 

On Saturday 1 July at 11 a.m., at the Capodimonte Museum, within the context of the Incontri sensibili cycle, curated by Sylvain Bellenger and Laura Trisorio, two of Jan Fabre’s works made entirely of beetle shells (Ancient Egyptian sacred animal, a symbol of immortality), a distinctive and recurring element in his oeuvre, are to be situated in a wunderkammer in dialogue with several naturalia and artificialia rarities, collected by the Farnese between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The selection of “wonders”, presented in modern glass cabinets, is composed of art objects in rock crystal, bronze, ivory, amber and in unusual, bizarre materials such as rhinoceros horn, deer antler and coconut in addition to manmade objects from explored lands. 

On July 1 and 2, at the Politeama Theatre in Naples, as part of the Napoli Teatro Festival, the versatile Belgian artist will also present the avant-première of Belgian Rules/Belgium Rules, his new theatrical production. 

Jan Fabre was the first contemporary artist to be featured a solo exhibit at the Louvre Museum in Paris (2008). He has shown numerous installations in public spaces including the Tivoli Castle (1990), the Royal Palace of Brussels (2002), the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels (2013) and the Antwerp Cathedral (2015) as well as many exhibits in several of the world’s leading museums: Palazzo Benzon, Venice (2007), the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2008), the Arsenale Novissimo, Venice (2009), the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (2011), the Nuova Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia, Venice (2011) and the MAXXI, Rome (2013). In 2016, the Jan Fabre. Spiritual Guards exhibit entailed showing more than eighty works in Florence between Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio and Forte di Belvedere. The show held at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, which was open until 30 April, 2017, was viewed by some 1,160,000 visitors.

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