Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Superficially is Giacomo Zaganelli’s first solo exhibition at MOCA, Taipei. As an artist and a curator, Giacomo Zaganelli’s practice activated a potent dialogue between sculpture, video, and site-responsive installation. His works draw in a vast array of cultural, architecture, landscape, environment, and historical archaeology. By introducing traditional elements from the local community, and combining specific sites or space, his projects tend to reflect the social milieu of the time, create a dialogue between old and new, and to reexamine the contradictory situation in our modern times. Giacomo Zaganelli comes from Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, where the local thriving tourism has ushered in a large influx of tourists taking over the area’s renowned destinations. Surrounded by magnificent sceneries, the attention of the tourists are, however, fixed on their phones or personal electronic devices, with the city’s centuries-old historical architectures and sculptures falling to supporting roles in people’s photographs or where they “check-in” online. Moreover, tarps with the façades of the sites printed on them are placed on barricades and scaffoldings when the area’s architectural heritage sites are closed for renovation; however, the tourists’ desires for photo taking don’t seem to be deterred by these “counterfeit spectacles”. Giacomo Zaganelli thinks the entire city seems to have turned into a large theatrical set designed to accommodate the preference of the general public, and the people scrambling over each other in order to take photos or have photos taken of them appear like a circus in disarray, looking quite ridiculous and peculiar. French philosopher Guy Debord proposed in The Society of the Spectacle, “…the spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product of real activity. Likewise, lived reality suffers the material assaults of the spectacle's mechanisms of contemplation…” The “Superficially” examined in this exhibition does not point at ancient city’s traditional and romantic impression but exposes how virtual landscapes have successfully dominated modern people’s perceptual life. Working with the exhibition space inside the museum, Giacomo Zaganelli presents in this exhibition a series of videos and installations he has created in Taiwan, with the exhibition further extended outwards to the museum’s outdoor plaza, allowing the audience to experience his impactful art in a more direct manner.