Metropolitan Life
The Nivola Museum is proud to announce the first Italian solo show of Bettina Pousttchi.
At the Nivola Museum Pousttchi presents the project Metropolitan Life, taking inspiration from Costantino Nivola’s urban flâneries. The museum’s exhibition space has been completely transformed by a site-specific photo installation: a huge photographic print on textile hangs from the ceiling and runs through the entire space, redefining it. It’s a digital reworking of the facade of the Metropolitan Life Building, a New York skyscraper on 1 Madison Avenue, in front of the Flatiron Building, not far from Nivola’s studio. Criticized, shortly after its construction in 1909, for its blatant Italian references (its shape is clearly modeled after the San Marco’s bell tower in Venice), the building – the tallest in the world until 1913 – displays a hybrid identity, recalling cultural and temporal/spacial dislocations between the Old and the New world, Renaissance and Modernism, Europe and United States. Its virtual relocation in Orani, Sardinia, adds a further layer of meaning to this play of cross-references.
