Conversation with Montanari

For the occasion of Elio Montanari’s first major solo exhibition, “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand,” curator Catherine David will open the floor by tracing the special bond formed between photographer and artist.

In particular, she will illuminate the network of confidence established between the photographer, artistic collaborators and the existence of an archive of documents, for artists and performers from the 1950s until the end of the 1970s.

Montanari will then join David to comment on why he chose to focus more on the labor of the work of art than the author and how this is expressed in his exhibition of over 200 photographs dating from 1982 up until the ninth Istanbul Biennial that took place in 2005.

David and Montanari first met in 1994 when David was a curator at Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris where Montanari photographed Pier Paolo Calzolari installing his solo exhibition Pier Paolo Calzolari.