Andrea Galvani. The End

Developed over two years of research conducted in the United States and Mexico, The End is a cross-disciplinary trilogy of multimedia works. Art in General will present a unique stage of this project – a multichannel, synchronized video installation documenting one collective action. The End is an homage to the heliocentric model of our solar system championed by Galileo Galilei, father of modern cosmology.

Over the course of months, Andrea Galvani coordinated with local camera operators to film the sunrise along the eastern coastlines of five different Central American countries. On January 8, the anniversary of Galileo’s death in 1642, the event was filmed in over 30 different locations simultaneously. In the resulting installation, the horizon line where the sky meets the sea becomes continuous and seemingly infinite, extending our perceptions of time and space. Concurrently, the simultaneous temporal actions are made distinguishable by discrepancies in atmospheric conditions, the sensitivity of 16mm film, and the movements of each hand held camera. The resulting installation juxtaposes a multiplicity of subjective perspectives, expanding the horizon into a unified visual field. 

The End challenges the idea of boundaries as points of separation, instead suggesting points of contact. Boundaries change position, accumulate power, produce energy. They define topologies and conditions of differential equations in mathematics; they govern the laws of thermodynamics. Boundaries can be political, geographical, or psychological territories. Horizons are the perimeters of perception, both sensitive and cognitive. With The End, Galvani seeks to extend our experience of the horizon’s spatial and temporal limits, articulating their physical and conceptual elasticity.

Geological time began with the first sunrise: a recurring event representing the primordial chronography of our planet’s movement around the sun. We are part of this continuum for a brief moment, a single oscillation in the pendulum of cosmic existence. The End presents the opportunity to witness the sunrise ad infinitum.

Andrea Galvani is an Italian artist living and working in New York and Mexico City. He earned a BFA in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1999 and his MFA in Visual Art from Bilbao University in 2002. His work has been exhibited at international venues including the Whitney Museum, New York; 4th Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art; the Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland; 9th Biennale of Contemporary Art of Nicaragua; Aperture Foundation, New York; The Calder Foundation, New York; Mart Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Trento, Italy; Macro Museum, Rome; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam; Oslo Plads, Copenhagen, among others. In 2011, he received the New York Exposure Prize and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has been a visiting artist at NYU (2009-10) and has completed artist residencies at Location One International Artist Residency Program New York (2008), LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2009), M.I.A. Artist Space Program/Columbia University School of the Arts, Brooklyn, NY (2010). From 2006 to 2009, he was a professor of Photographic Language and the History of Contemporary Photography at the University of Carrara for Fine Arts in Bergamo, Italy.