STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI and 2RC Edizioni d’Arte are delighted to present: The Yoko Ono Film Festival, a retrospective of films and video art by Yoko Ono, specifically created for VIDEOCITTÀ's video art program.
Over 22 years after its first edition, made possible with support from the City of Rome and presented at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni as part of Projected Artists – Obiettivo: Roma, the film festival returns to the capital in an expanded format, entirely curated by the artist.
The Festival includes 14 works from the artist’s career, all produced between 1966 and 1982. This selection previously presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1991, curated by the American Federation of Arts. This main body is complemented with Painting to Shake Hands, ARISING and Bad Dancer, all of which were produced in a two-year period from 2012 to 2013. These three new pieces will take centre stage as part of a special event to be held at the Studio on 23rd October.
The Yoko Ono Film Festival is the seventh project on which the artist and the Studio have worked together, following: A Piece of Sky (1993); Lighting Piece (1995); the aforementioned participation in Projected Artists in 1996; the screenings in Piazza del Popolo for New Year’s Eve in 1998; and finally, I’ll Be Back and SMILE at MACRO Testaccio (2010).
Yoko Ono is one of the foremost exponents of Conceptual art; since the 1960s she has built her practice on multidisciplinarity, expressing herself through music, writing, painting, drawing and installation. The works presented are characterized by the variety of their formal approaches, and they reveal the numerous aspects of a multifaceted practice: a commitment to social issues, autobiographical material, political activism, musical performances, and feminism. Ono’s filmic output – itself a milestone in American avant-garde cinema – has always stood out by virtue of its radical conceptual stamp. The body plays a central role, both as an object within the point of view and as the bearer of a gaze – a tension created by the artist in order to make the viewer an active participant, one in dialogue with the images and in the construction of the work.
VIDEOCITTÀ, created by Francesco Rutelli, ANICA’s President, will spread around Rome from 19th to 28th October, in conjunction with the Roma Film Festival and the International Audiovisual Market (MIA), promoting unity and dialogue between the creative and the productive worlds of moving images through the involvement of a large audience, offering a chance to these worlds to show their ability to create work, enhance the professionalism rooted in the Cinema and Audiovisual industries as well as give rise to new trades and entrepreneurial and creative ventures.