Biography

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

Merano 1942, lives in Milan

Lugo di Romagna 1942 – Milan 2018

 

Since the 1970s, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have expanded the idea of avant-garde cinema by including archive materials and their reproposition as a mode to critically reread History. Their work makes use of the “analytical camera”, a handcrafted filming device created for re-filming, frame by frame, films from the first half of the 20th century or films made by them. By revealing what the speed of the filmic movement otherwise conceals, the artists transform faces, gestures and landscapes and propose alternative readings to the original ones, revealing their propaganda intentions.

Pays Barbare (2013) (Barbaric Country, 2013) addresses the representation of Fascist power, the history of Italian colonialism in Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia and its crimes through intimate or state images, aerial shots and documentary photographs. The frames, reassembled and turned cyan, magenta and yellow, present an ambiguous and rarely accessible insight into collective Italian memory, raising the question of which countries could be addressed as ‘barbaric’.

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Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi, installation view, 2020 Art Quadriennale FUORI

Photo DSL Studio

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Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi, installation view, 2020 Art Quadriennale FUORI

Photo DSL Studio