Inauguration on Saturday 7 October 2023 from 11am to 7pm

Let the bad speak presents the works of seven artists from Iran and Afghanistan: Elmira Abolhasani, Hoda Afshar, Elyas Alavi, Armin Amirian, Hangama Amiri, Latifa Zafar Attaii, Naseer Turkmani.
The common thread is the heartfelt desire to establish an intercultural dialogue, which deconstructs the classic interpretative categories of the Middle Eastern scenario by drawing attention to the events and stories of the people who come from those contexts.

Bad, in Dari/Farsi, means “wind”. The wind is also, metaphorically, the voice of the Afghan and Iranian people. Every year, for 120 days, it visits Afghanistan and the Iranian plateau, howling impetuously across their steppes. The wind can collect stories, making them travel beyond borders. With its intangible essence, it embodies transience and, yet, it is the best master in showing how to survive in uncertainty and impermanence. The title of the exhibition – appealing to a fortunate assonance with the English word bad – aims to summarize the desire to fight any superficial ethical polarization between “good” and “evil”, the desire to restore the word to the Iranian and Afghan population and the choice to observe their situation beyond the stereotypes, in its complexity, without neglecting its surprising contradictions.

Through a plurality of media, the protagonist artists will not fail to evoke unexpected consonances between the Afghan-Iranian scene and the rest of the world. Working on themes such as the relationship between personal identity and uprooting from the motherland, the intertwining of cultural memory and individual biographies, Let the bad speak paints landscapes in which everyone can see themselves reflected, recognize themselves and re-discover themselves.

On Saturday 7 October, for the first time and only on that day, Fondazione 107 opens a temporary space to the public in which it presents Amen, a site-specific project by Federico Piccari. The artist presents a complex project in which bronze sculptures interface with paintings, videos, photography and installations.
The exhibition takes place in an atypical territory, an abandoned shed where neglect and the passage of time have left their traces. In this place we do not find the parameters of the typical museum or art gallery and the works integrate with the abandoned objects, giving rise to an infinite chain of meanings.
The central categories of existence become temporariness, vertigo, the difficulty of accepting the other from oneself.

They are restless and disturbing signs perspicuously captured by Federico Piccari’s thirty-year research which penetrates the cracks of reality to grasp the flaws, the ambivalences, the loss of meaning. Nothing is as it appears. His works, diversified in the multiple techniques presented, always lead back to the impenetrable reality that lies behind appearance, to the ontic fragility that characterizes the contemporary human dimension and defines its ambiguity. Also underlining the need to recover “humanity” as a founding element.

LET THE BAD SPEAK
curated by Exo Art Lab
the artists will be present
5pm performance by Elyas Alavi
8 October – 26 November 2023 • opening hours: Saturday-Sunday 2pm-7pm
FOUNDATION 107
via Sansovino 234, Turin

Entrance: 8 euros; reduced (from 13 to 18 years) 5 euros
Free entry up to 12 years old and for Piedmont Museum Pass holders
Guided tours by reservation and every Sunday at 4pm
Information: +39 347 6603149 • amministrazione107.it • 107fondazione@gmail.com