5,000 square meters of corridors and lighted rooms, tunnels, neon sculptures… The Pirelli hangar has been transformed into a labyrinth of lights. An ideal place to experiment with the multimedia research initiated by Bruce Nauman in the mid-1960s, interacting with the visual, bodily, luminous, and sound perception of space. Organized in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the exhibition brings together thirty of the artist’s founding works. It reveals the strategies employed by the master of destabilization and constraints: endurance in Performance Corridor (1969) or Walk in Contrapposto (1968), dazzlement in Green Light Corridor – a corridor reduced to its narrowest expression flooded with green fluorescent light (1970), the loss of reference points in Double Wedge Corridor with Mirror (1970) or Dream Passage with Four Corridors (1984)… Intended to lead to a greater awareness of the limits of our physicality, these works, consisting of physical, sensory, and emotional journeys, are indeed to be walked, experienced, and not contemplated. 

However, Bruce Nauman has gone further: Created in Milan in 1971 and re-enacted here for the first time, Funnel Piece exploits electronic surveillance tools, such as closed-circuit cameras, to explore the reactions of visitors when they discover that they are being recorded and monitored… More poetic, Dream Passage with Four Corridors (1984) features corridors and everyday objects (tables, chairs) under fluorescent lights to create a “dreamlike domestic environment,” while in Mapping the studio (2001), the disruption becomes more pictorial: Unveiled by means of seven video projectors, the images of the artist’s studio, altered or turned upside down by chromatic changes, provoke in the voyeur spectator a feeling of spatial and temporal dislocation that is truly disturbing… 

Until 25 February
Pirelli Hangar Bicocca
Via Chiese 2, Milan

www.pirellihangarbicocca.org

Stéphanie Dulout