Goshka Macuga possibly in the pipeline at the new Fondazione Prada in Milan

The new awaited venue of the Fondazione Prada, a former distillery located in the south part of Milan, will open to the public next May, and the expectations for the program which this influential institution will offer are of course very high; not only in the art world, not only because it will be the main contemporary art institution in Italy, and not only because the Expo and the Venice Biennale are going to open in the same days.

As Ms. Prada announced last summer in an interview with Cathy Horyn, the new headquarter of her museum will be inaugurated with an exhibition questioning the use of copies in sculpture during the Roman empire. Now some rumours have started circulating about the exhibition that will probably follow.

If they are confirmed, the show will be dedicated to the Polish-born artist Goshka Macuga who, it seems, has recently been allowed to visit the still under-restoration spaces to shape her project.

Considering that the Prada Foundation is the owner of the enormous Macuga’s tapestry presented in the last edition of dOCUMENTA13 in Kassel, as well as being among the lenders of the recent solo exhibition dedicated to the artist by the Lunds Konsthall, Sweden, the information is likely to be true.

Moreover, the choice of the artist/curator Macuga, who is known for her information based art practice and her politically aware dialogues with culture icons from the past like Guernica by Pablo Picasso or Karl Marx, would be coherent with the idea of linking different cultures, in time and space, that the Fondazione Prada has been following with projects such as The Double Club in London (by Carsten Holler), or the recent Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition “When attitudes become forms” re-enacted in Venice, at Ca’ Corner della Regina, in occasion of the last Biennial.

In this case Macuga will probably have to face the problem of relating with a stratified and highly complicated historical and artistic environment as the Italian one is. However, her summer staying in Stromboli hosted by the Fiorucci Art Trust, along with her experience at the Venice Biennial in 2009, will certainly help her to face this ambitious challenge.

January 9, 2017