An imposing oil on canvas between Bollywood and the Roman suburbs, diaspora and cultural integration.
Navin Rawanchaikul (Chiang Mai, 1971), one of Asia’s leading contemporary artists, presents a site-specific project at MAXXI in which he brings together the central themes of his research. The impact of globalisation, migration, the tension between society and the individual and the development of cultural identities are aspects of contemporary society that Rawanchaikul places in an autobiographical dimension, drawing on his Indian origins, as well as a historical one, reinterpreting the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent through the lives of the diasporic communities he met in Chiang Mai, Dubai and Rome. The aesthetic dimension of Rawanchaikul’s work can be traced back to the precise and powerfully original work entrusted to the ready-made, to a painting that reworks the iconography of the great posters of Indian cinema, to comic strips, videos and performative actions.
Ciao da Roma. Navin Rawanchaikul is the result of the artist’s trip to Rome in the autumn of 2018. The testimonies that Rawanchaikul collected from West Asian migrants, who arrived in Lazio in the early 1990s, lead him in many directions: from cricket matches in the capital with mixed teams of Italians and migrants, to the countryside of Agro Pontino, where the Sikh community is a victim of the so-called agromafias; to the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Cassino, where the very young Indian soldiers who fought for the liberation of Italy in World War II are buried.
The exhibition includes the large canvas commissioned by the Museum, a video, a letter and a billboard. Two works are also on display – a T-shirt and two photographic prints – part of the Gujranwala series, started in 2013 and linked to the Ciao da Roma project.
The works in the exhibition have entered the MAXXI Collection. Special thanks to European Art Council.
header: Navin Rawanchaikul, Ciao da Roma, 2018. Painting, oil on canvas, 160 x 330 cm. Courtesy Navin Production.
An imposing oil on canvas between Bollywood and the Roman suburbs, diaspora and cultural integration.
Navin Rawanchaikul (Chiang Mai, 1971), one of Asia’s leading contemporary artists, presents a site-specific project at MAXXI in which he brings together the central themes of his research. The impact of globalisation, migration, the tension between society and the individual and the development of cultural identities are aspects of contemporary society that Rawanchaikul places in an autobiographical dimension, drawing on his Indian origins, as well as a historical one, reinterpreting the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent through the lives of the diasporic communities he met in Chiang Mai, Dubai and Rome. The aesthetic dimension of Rawanchaikul’s work can be traced back to the precise and powerfully original work entrusted to the ready-made, to a painting that reworks the iconography of the great posters of Indian cinema, to comic strips, videos and performative actions.
Ciao da Roma. Navin Rawanchaikul is the result of the artist’s trip to Rome in the autumn of 2018. The testimonies that Rawanchaikul collected from West Asian migrants, who arrived in Lazio in the early 1990s, lead him in many directions: from cricket matches in the capital with mixed teams of Italians and migrants, to the countryside of Agro Pontino, where the Sikh community is a victim of the so-called agromafias; to the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Cassino, where the very young Indian soldiers who fought for the liberation of Italy in World War II are buried.
The exhibition includes the large canvas commissioned by the Museum, a video, a letter and a billboard. Two works are also on display – a T-shirt and two photographic prints – part of the Gujranwala series, started in 2013 and linked to the Ciao da Roma project.
The works in the exhibition have entered the MAXXI Collection. Special thanks to European Art Council.
header: Navin Rawanchaikul, Ciao da Roma, 2018. Painting, oil on canvas, 160 x 330 cm. Courtesy Navin Production.