Line of duty

From Thursday, January 26, 2023, the spaces of Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani present Line of Duty: a double solo exhibition by artists Badiucao (China, 1986) and Gianluca Costantini (Ravenna, 1971). The exhibition project is configured as the natural continuation of a dialogue between two artists geographically distant, yet close in vocation and language, united by a gaze always ready to confront the social and geopolitical contradictions of the present. It is no coincidence that Badiucao and Costantini met on Twitter, sharing an 'other' space that, in a time when borders are getting stronger and inequalities are increasing, has the possibility of creating fissures: glimpses of expressive freedom in which political militancy can condense into words and images that, as in a great Global Square, circulate from hand to hand and from screen to screen, germinating a shared awareness. Conceived in this way, the exhibition Line of Duty is then also a fissure: a space of possibility in which it is the line - the one that decisively traces the migrant bodies in Costantini's drawings and shapes the bitter pop irony of Badiucao's works - that constructs images somewhere between testimony and symbol: new frameworks of the present in which the adherence of the chronicler meets the aesthetic translation of the militant artist. In this interweaving, biography and artistic research refer to each other: the Badiucao affair is already written in his name - an alias created to maintain anonymity even in Melbourne, where the artist lives and works in voluntary exile, at a distance from the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus - while Costantini has also met with the establishment of Turkish President Erdoğan, who issued a condemnation against him for "terrorism" for his drawings after the failed coup attempt in 2016. 

If the former operates a direct critique of the repressive apparatus of his native country through a language strained between parody and disquiet, the latter uses drawing as a moment of synthesis: the repeated and successful attempt to create iconic figures out of the silhouettes victimized by global news, which, for example, became the object of political action with the silhouette of Patrick Zaki or the drawings in support of the Iranian uprising. Thus, another resonance emerges between Badiucao and Costantini: the shared urgency of using artistic practice as a means of aesthetic revelation and direct action in defense of human rights, especially in a historical moment harried by the overproduction and saturation of informational space where the excluded names, voices, and bodies risk remaining invisible. 

Finally, the Line of Duty exhibition marks the initial trace of a big question: what resonance can art have in the complex intertwining of geopolitical power and social inequalities? The works-lives of Badiucao and Costantini pave the way by creating imaginaries of resistance: visual but also symbolic lines, which like faults breach the wall of globalized violence and the mechanics of consolidated power.