Studio Orta

The work of the artists, an ongoing dialogue between ethics and aesthetics, investigates various crucial themes facing the world today: community and the social fabric, dwelling and the habitat, nomadism and mobility, sustainable development, ecology and recycling. In their working practice the Ortas also distinguish themselves as skilled mediators, interventionists, provocateurs, activists, campaigners, persuaders, interlocutors, teachers, conservationists, and much more. The exhibition at the Galleria Continua comprises a cross-section of the artists’ work over the last year, presenting three projects that relate to three distinct issues of great topical pertinence: Orta Water, which is about the impending water crisis; Fallujah, about the war atrocities in Iraq; and Antarctic Village, which explores the notion of migration, territory and borders. Antarctic Village - No Borders will occupy the large stalls area of the former cinema and consists of a village of dome architectures and drop-parachutes bearing hundreds of national flags and silkscreen reproductions of a new ammendment to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 13:3, an ambitious work-in-progress that the artists have been engaged on since the beginning of the 90s and which involved the installation of a temporary metaphoric village in Antarctica.