Olympia

The exhibition “Olympia” borrows its name from the ancient side on Greece’s Peloponnese penincula that hosted the original Olympic Games in classical times. Aldo Giannotti forces the legacy of this ancient sport site into the institution itself, enableing through his drawings not only the possibility of a phisycal engagement but a “take on” thematics that are driven out of sports such as competition, national representations and power structures on a global scale. Through his work the instituion becomes a stadium of possiblities, engagements and sarcastic comments – a look at our society from the individual up to the collective, national, global and universal.   Aldo Giannotti has developed „Olympia” in the last couple of months and on site during his stay in Sofia. By using and re-contextualising materials and devices often found in sport arenas, such as podiums, running mates and sport items, it explores how human interactions with an institution for art can be staged and enacted differently, in ways that emphasise and disrupt the binaries of social behavior we are expected to demonstrate when entering a museum. Giannotti does this by making us all become active players in his Olympics, both in a physical and a conceptual manner.   (Martina Yordonova)