Anna Franceschini
Biography
Anna Franceschini (Pavia, IT, 1979) investigates objects, artefacts, commodities and their modes of display to rediscuss their role and configuration in the horizon of the aesthetics of capital. Underlying her investigation of reality is cinema through its constituent elements: movement, light, framing and editing. Kinetic sculptures, performances, bachelor machines, and photocopies are for the artist a cinema made by other means.
Franceschini’s current work seeks to expand the concept of animation in sculptural terms. Reversing the terms of the discussion about "cinema as machine," the artists seeks to redirect the gaze toward the hypothesis of a "machine as cinema." By creating sculptural moving images, she turns commodities into quasi living beings and fabricates apparatuses whose subjectivity is emphasised within a mise-en-scène.
Her films without film, made of machines and utensils, reflect on contemporaneity as a panorama of spectacular objects: in the womb of late capitalism, motorised accidents, animated byproducts of industrial processes become spectacle.
Anna Franceschini's work is currently part of the group exhibition Diario Notturno at MAXXI L'Aquila, and was recently presented in Triennale Milano. She was included in the exhibition After Laughter Comes Tears at MUDAM Luxembourg (2023) which was accompanied by a performance. Past solo exhibitions include : Kunstverein Duesseldorf; Spike Island, Bristol; Museion, Bolzano; Fiorucci Art Trust, London; Almanac, London; KIOSK, Ghent; Vistamare Milan/Pescara; Almanac, London. She took part in the 2020 Art Quadriennale, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.
Her videos and films have been presented in several festivals, including: Rotterdam Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; Torino Film Festival, Courtisane in Ghent and Vilnius Film Festival.
She participated in group shows at: MUDAM Luxembourg (2023); Neuer Kunstverein, Wien; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; HFKD, Holstebro; Campoli Presti, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Istituto Svizzero, Milan-Venice; ICA, Milan; CAC, Vilnius; Kunstraum, London; Matadero, Madrid; MAXXI, Rome; Villa Medici, Rome.
In 2017 her project CARTABURRO won the Italian Council grant, promoted by the Ministry of Culture. In 2019 she made the short film BUSTROFEDICO, a special project for the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee for the year 2022.
Her work is part of several institutional collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; and GAMeC, Bergamo.
Anna Franceschini holds a PhD in Visual and Media Studies and teaches at IULM University in Milan. Since 2022, she is Art-based Researcher for AN-ICON, a research group funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and hosted by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan.
