2019 – Site-Specific Video Essay
for Holding What Can’t be Held, MING Studios, Boise ID (US).
Continue reading „THE FOLLOWING QUIET IS BROKEN“
Born in Turin, Italy, Irina Novarese received a BA in Fine Arts from the Accademia Albertina, Turin; and an MA in Art in Context from the UdK Berlin.
Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in various museums, galleries and off-site projects in Italy, Germany, Spain, Venezuela and the USA, as well as in group exhibitions including: the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale (2006); the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Haiti (2012); the MOR Museo orgánico Romerillo, 12th Havana Biennial (2015), BIENAL SUR (2021), and the POSVERSO Biennial (2024).
Irina Novarese is a visual artist who works with mixed media installations, editions and video. Her works start from affinities – encounters with themes deeply related to urban spaces. She navigates them, collects data and remaps her own networks of associations, working site-specifically in the multiple contexts related to cities. In her practice, she longs and searches for other people to exchange ideas, explore concepts, discover places. Currently some of her works are deeply related to the relationship between urbanity and language, seen primarily as a poetic infrastructure.
Participation and collectivity are fundamental elements of numerous projects in which Irina Novarese works as an artist, organiser and curator, aiming to develop artistic communities based on contributions, knowledge and common interests.
Current memberships are: HIER&JETZT: Connections – a residency and exchange program for artists in exile, Berlin; The Watch, residency program in the former GDR watchtower at Schlesischer Busch, Berlin; MING Studios, Contemporary Art Center & International Artist in Residency Program, Boise, Idaho (USA).
Since 2020 Irina Novarese is a member of the Independent Studio Advisory Board of the bbk Berlin e.V.
Her works are included in the collections of MUFOCO – Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea (IT); ARTPHILEIN FOUNDATION (CH); Universitat Politecnica de València (ES); GAM, Museum of Modern Art, Turin (IT); APERTO, Contemporary Art Museum, Barge, (IT); PAV, Parco d’arte Vivente, Turin (IT); as well as in international private collections.
Irina Novarese’s work is represented by the Canèm Gallery, Castellon (ES)
exhibitions, projects, grants
Projects and Cooperations
Continue reading „ARTISTIC EDUCATIONAL WORK(S)“
2018 Site-Specific Project
GOETHE NA VILA – Vila Itororó, Sao Paulo, Brasil
FALE NOVAMENTE, FALE COMO CHUVA – SPEAK AGAIN, SPEAK LIKE RAIN is a participative project on spoken words as cultural form of activism moreover on urban interstices seen as chances and resources through the practice of Sarau and Slam poetry, which engage the participants to debate the right to the city, to celebrate urban life, to embrace visions and concrete’s surfaces. Continue reading „SPEAK AGAIN, SPEAK LIKE RAIN“
ARTS LIBRIS
So glad about the Reward of the Fundación Banc Sabadell for my Artist Books presented by the Caném Gallery at the International Fair of Artists‘ Books and Contemporary Editions 9th edition Barcelona. April 2018
2018 Mixed Media Installation
A collage of datas, thoughts and visions report to the ideas and projects of urban planning, realities of worldwide trading till fictional neighborhood builded for military purposes. Continue reading „THE FOURTH WALL“
2017 Site-Specific Mixed Media Installation
MING STUDIOS – Contemporary Art Center & international Residency Program, Boise, Idaho (USA)
The origin of the site-specific, solo exhibition ONE SHOT is an investigation into a image sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation entitled All Female Survey Crew taken in 1918, during the works for the Mindoka infrastructure Project in Idaho.
The work’s group titled INTERSTICES/CRACKS is related to the broad comprehension of living space in relation with infrastructures and their interstitial spaces.
International video-art screenings and presentations * 2015-2018
KIN*K took place each month at BLO-ATELIERS in Berlin, Lichtenberg.
Curated by Irina Novarese & Marco Pezzotta, with the great support of BLO-Ateliers LockKunst e.V. and all the invited artists.
The Project was funded by Bezirkskulturfonds Lichtenberg
NOTES ON THE WESTWARD JOURNEY is a work composed by a video and five artist’s books. Here I deal specifically with women’s diaries of migration during the so called Westward Journey in the US, between 1841 and 1867.
Silke Bauer, Irina Novarese and Viola Thiele
* since 2011
A*BOUT – ARTIST GROUP
We got to know each other during the MA program “Art in Context” at the UdK Berlin. Our own biographical and parallel interests in artistic forms such as situative installations and process-oriented, project-based work encouraged us to develop participatory and interdisciplinary projects. One of these included the project Hydromemories, which has been presented in four exhibitions in Europe and Venezuela.
A map can be described as a two dimensional interpretative representation of an area. Nevertheless the map stands for a reading of existing spaces in which people are moving toward, following routes, necessities and needs, desires and thoughts. MAPPING IT OUT is a participative project. A map of La Havana after the point of view and the experiences of the people: a representation of what for me means reality.
For this series of works I employed a slow and meticulous process of active but nevertheless approximate mapping of a city’s actual existing systems and dynamics. In its core the project surveys urban structures as places that oscillate between desire and repulsion, between basic needs/necessities and the ultra-de-luxe, in which a city’s accelerated ow is perceived as the last place of the social.
Continue reading „LANDOLOGY. GLIMPSES OF A DIVERSITIES’S POLITIC.“
Caracas’s urban structure is the focus of a cartographical representation of Caracas composed of drawings, prints, site-specific installations and an artist’s book as a catalog of the exhibition.
Continue reading „LANDOLOGY. FALLING BACK TO CARACAS FROM THE PERIPHERIES OF MY FIELD.“
A dystopic intuition on new geographies, this installation follows a project about water resources and provisions, specifically after the observation of water reservoirs in California, where the waters are protected from the sun rays through black plastic spheres. Not really the ideal representational objects for an ecological environment.
The project titled ABOUT DISTANCE AND DENSITY expand upon concepts like Landscapes, Land‘s survey and the perceptual space in always changing urban environments.
Continue reading „ÜBER DISTANZ UND DICHTE / ABOUT DISTANCE AND DENSITY“
A project of Bastian Aarler & Irina Novarese
Shadowboxing is an exercise used in training, especially, as the name implies, in boxing. It is used mainly to hone the muscles and reflexes. In shadowboxing, a sole participant throws punches at an imaginary opponent. The name was coined because boxers would practice by using their own shadows or a mirror as a sparring partner. An interesting paradox arrises from the notion of a fight against oneself, as it is impossible to win or lose the match, the only certain result being that one will tire oneself out. Incidentally, in psychology shadowboxing refers to the process of overcoming a negative self-image which, for example, prevents one from achieving success.
AAA The Desert Series is a compilation of works, realized between 2012 and 2014, and related to the construction of fictional territories starting from existing ones. Drawings, installations, printed works, collages and artist’s books compose a narration on unbounded landscapes coming out from the relation between micro and macro visual elements.
HOW TO LIE WITH MAPS is a series of installations made with black aluminum foil stripes, which build nets-like maps. The work is inspired by the same-named book of Marc Monmonier and on the possibility to create a plausible territory from the perception of an existing one.
Proceding the investigation on the line between real and fictive territories, the series of works and the artist’s book HOW TO FIND PLACES: OR MY PSEUDOSCIENCE OF WHEREABOUTS. focus on the manipulation of real elements in order to construct a simulated territory.
Continue reading „HOW TO FIND PLACES: OR MY PSEUDOSCIENCE OF WHEREABOUTS.“
The walk moves toward the Alexanderplatz, following the narrative path of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Continue reading „WALK WITH THE ARTIST * BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ“
Realized for the exhibition NINES (Dolls) at the Canèm Gallery, Castellòn
installation with 89 ceramic elements – 2012
Hydromemories is an interdisciplinary artistic project on the theme of water that originated from the collaboration of an international group of artists in cooperation with the group Engineers without Borders. Hydromemories is a nomadic and flexible project, a laboratory of images which brings together international artists who have dedicated a part of their research to the theme of water.
First exhibited in a former swimming pool in Berlin, then in the frame of the Berlin Water Fair; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, the 2012 exhibition in Turin was hosted in an annex of the Museum of Natural Sciences.
Through installations realized by some of the artists, Hydromemories concretely supports the work of Engineers without Borders, as well as other NGO’s working on hydric resources, whose projects employ innovative yet simple engineering methods in order to provide much needed low cost solutions to water access: such as the construction of water tanks in the rural community of Kagera in Tanzania and the rehabilitation of Water Wells in Niger.
Installation site specific – 2012
Work commisioned by Lithops, research center for electric batteries, Italy
Remind me then to give you the instructions on how to get lost is a mixed media compilation of works: black aluminum thread installation, drawings, collages and an artist’s book based on the construction of fictional spaces and geographies derived from the perception and the research on real landscapes.
Continue reading „REMIND ME THEN TO GIVE YOU THE INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO GET LOST“
It is not a toy (It is a failure) – paradigm #1
objects for the social context * 2011
shopping cart, plastic bags, tape
N Main street, Los Angeles
Realized during the residency at Raid Projects, Los Angeles
Patterns. Trees in Lincoln Heights is an installation based on infrastructural objects observed in California during a residency project in 2011. Continue reading „PATTERNS“
In the summer of 2007, I was in Belgrade for an artist residency. During a visit to the Novo Groblje Cemetery, I had the fortune of meeting Ms Milka Janszoon, an elderly Australian lady who was travelling with her son Vladimir. They were there to get to know the hometown of Rile Lesov, the man who was Vladimir’s father and who had been her partner and until he disappeared on the 3rd of April 1964 in the F5 Tornado at Wichita Falls, Texas. Rile Lesov was one of seven people who died in that tornado.
multi media installation * 2010
Compared to portrayals I have been working on in the past, in which my attention was focused on the way self-representational forms of a certain subject mutate within an heterogeneous context like Facebook, in The Furno’s Book the experimentation field is extended to a more dynamical and contemporary objet trouvé. By way of facebook I have begun to interact, through the fictional identity of Mrs Furno, with unknown people which shared Furno as same surname.
Video project for the public space. Pescara, Italy.
Three video works about public space and living context in different cities (Berlin, Shanghai).
SPAZIO MONO #1 is a project of UNOaUNO studio – Arch. Umberto Ulisse and Marino La Torre –
* 2010
„Using found photographs as starting point Irina Novarese reflects on the perceptive, associative and not least physical space that is identity. Working on these topics she interacts with other persons in order to create fictional biographies that she defines as third subject. Based on the theoretical basis of her practice, the video Inter_Subject becomes a new experiment defining those fictional places in process.“
INTER_SUBJECT * 2009
Video DVD 7’40“ * 7/7 copies with english subtitles // stereo
MemoArt artistic group: Dominique Hurth, Irina Novarese, Zala Unkmeir, Sabe Wunsch in cooperation with Katja Jedermann.
Conception and Research of the exhibition Forced sex labour in Nazi concentration camps.
In collaboration with Institute for Art in Context, UdK Berlin, Ravensbrück National Memorial, Dr. Robert Sommer, Dr. Christl Wickert (2006-2009)
The installation is an experiment based on our perception and reaction in front of a portrait of an unknown person and the interaction between dif ferent identities; the photographical representation of an existing identity and the plausibility of a fictive one.
multimedia installation * 2007-08
Realized for the Master Thesis at the Institut for Art in Context, UdK Berlin.
Continue reading „DAS DRITTE SUBJECT ODER: WER WAR FRAU FURNO?“
Site specific temporary installation for the exhibition Palm Fiction at Berlin Stralau – 2008
The Palm is a Collage realized directly on the wall. All the images are part of copies, of photos from the german colonialists: after the research-keywords “work and Oilpalm”.
K.G. Kollektives Gedächtnis Series
* 2005-2008
In 2000 I found about 500 portraits of unknown people in Italy, probably the work of a professional photograph. During the last years I produced many installations and videos realized with these photos. I describe these works as experiments about the interaction between different identities and memories. I define this as the “third subject”, meaning the outcome of the interaction between two or more other subjects. The associative system of the mnemonic structure of an observer, facing an unknown portrait reacts in producing an ascription of information about the possible identity of the person in the picture.
Continue reading „K.G. SERIES“
Site specific and temporary installation realized during the Residency at Foundation Spinola Banna for the Arts,
Turin * 2007
Collage with B/W Xerocopies on wall
Dimensions: 17 x 3 mt.
Continue reading „LA PRIMA IMMAGINE“
Project in cooperation with UNOAUNO Studio Arch. Alberto Ulisse, Marino La Torre, Pescara.
Presentend at the X Architecture Biennale of Venice, Italian Pavillon 2006
Exchange and living space for contemporary art as reaction to the one of the first gentrification-moment in Berlin
With 22 international artists (photography, installation, performance, music, theatre).
2005-2006
Interdisciplinary artistic project and group: Marco Callea, Irina Novarese, Alessandro Quaranta, Gianluca Sudano
2001-2005
The artistic project Il Magnete was grounded in 2001 from the necessity to create alternatives art spaces organised by artists. Together with Marco Callea, Gianluca Sudano and Alessandro Quaranta we started a series of events like exhibitions, lectures and a series of printed issues concerning the principal items broadened during the events.
Continue reading „IL MAGNETE“
Permanent photographic wall installation in public space for the renovated building of the former FERGAT factory in Turin, Italy. 2001
Continue reading „EX-FERGAT“