Robert Pettena
Guerre des Rêves
Barcelona
15.09 – 29.10.2022
War creates ruins, over and over again, ruins that are sometimes rebuilt and sometimes disappear. We continue to cancel the history of the war, although traces remain, which do not represent what was before or what will be in the future. With the exhibition Guerre des rêves, Robert Pettena investigates fictional regimes and how they affect social life to the point of making us doubt reality. Television reports take on the appearance of fiction and mimic reality, and the vision of planetary disasters is now subject to the whim of remote control. These new divisions between reality and fiction also condition the circulation between the individual imaginary (dreams), the collective imaginary (myths, rites, symbols), and the work of fiction.
Robert Pettena (Pembury, United Kingdom, 1970, lives and works in Florence. The beginnings of his artistic career are situated in the field of experimentation with video art and video installation; since 2000 his research focuses on the relationship between the video image and the spatial environment and has been integrated with other expressive possibilities, from photography to performative interventions, through site-specific projects (among the most recent The Torture of Meditation, Jump into the UnKnown, Future Rhythms, a collateral event of the 56th Venice Art Biennale for SaLE Docks). He taught in 2003 at the Salzburg Summer Academy, between 2004 and 2006 at the LDM Italian International Institute, and is currently a Professor of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.
