PAC Milan: the ‘PERFORMING PAC’ exhibition, bridging the legacy of Via Palestro and contemporary art
Until September, the PERFORMING PAC is offering a journey through Schwitters’ collages and the installations of Benassi and Ciancimino. History, poetry and politics in the heart of Milan
A necessary introduction: this July, I’m taking you to a place that, for me, is much more than just an art venue. The PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan – is, for me, inextricably linked to the memory of a warm July evening: 27 July 1993. I was still at secondary school at the time, yet I clearly remember the news report on the telly and I clearly remember the area, which I passed through a few days later: that night, a car bomb exploded in Via Palestro, right in front of the PAC. Five people died: the firefighters Carlo La Catena, Sergio Pasotto and Stefano Picerno; the municipal police officer Alessandro Ferrari; and Moussafir Driss, an immigrant of Moroccan origin who was sleeping on a bench nearby. The attack was the work of the Cosa Nostra: those were the years of the bloody attacks on Judges Falcone and Borsellino.
Since then, the PAC has had no choice but to come to terms with this wound, with this painful chapter in its history, which the curator Diego Sileo often evokes. He does so once again, in an original way – not through a sterile commemoration, but through a poetic and political manifesto on the rebirth of forms: the new edition of PERFORMING PAC, entitled “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. Curated by Silvia Bignami, Iolanda Ratti and Diego Sileo, the exhibition – which runs until mid-September – takes its title from T.S. Eliot’s famous lines from The Waste Land to stage a genuine archaeology of the present, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the reopening of the building, which was rebuilt by Ignazio Gardella in 1996 following the attack.
Views from the exhibition ‘Kurt Schwitters: Collages, Paintings and Sculptures 1914–1947’, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, 2001. Courtesy of PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan. Photograph: Mario Tedeschi
The exhibition format, conceived in 2018 to bring archival materials into dialogue with contemporary sensibilities, takes as its critical catalyst a fleeting historical flashback: the major 2001 exhibition dedicated to Kurt Schwitters, the undisputed master of montage and the Dadaist fragment. At the time, the Milan exhibition unveiled the complex constellation of Schwitters’ ‘MERZ’ world; today, four historic works from that exhibition – the collages Mz 253 Herz, Für Glaserherz (!Anna Blume?), King and the relief Grasmere – once again engage with visitors, alongside period documents and pages from the visitors’ book that recorded the collective awe at the Merzbau, that cathedral of scraps and spatial intuitions which grew upon itself as a total, navigable architecture.
Lucia Marcucci, War of Heroes, 1965. Collage on wood, 50 x 64 cm. Courtesy of a private collection, Rome. © Lucia Marcucci, by SIAE. Photo: Claudia Cataldi
It is around this concept of ‘building with rubble’ that the curators have organised the work of seven contemporary artists, invited to occupy the pavilion as a living, multi-layered organism. The exhibition begins with the biting visual irony of Lucia Marcucci, a pioneer of Visual Poetry in Italy and a leading figure in Gruppo 70: her twenty-five historic collages, created between 1964 and 1974 and displayed alongside recent works, orchestrate a montage of slogans and advertising clippings that dissects and denounces the commodification of the female body and the ambiguity of the mass media. The political tension and accumulation of humble materials continue in the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, who, in his 2021 series I-nfluencer-poster, assembles seventeen cardboard posters in which glossy images and handwritten philosophical quotations are held together by adhesive tape, under the banner of militant hashtags such as #Precariousness, #PublicSpace and #Resistance.The exhibition space is constantly breaking apart and reassembling itself: on the first floor, Roberto Cuoghi dismantles all museographic linearity with his previously unseen series of paintings, Pepsis, forcing the viewer to navigate a deliberately incoherent visual system, guided solely by their own perceptual reflexes. Not far away, the disordered legacy of the MERZ universe finds an ideal counterpart in the multi-material work Mien-Gribbohm-Wien-Milano by the German artist John Bock – a historic piece previously exhibited at the PAC in 2000, now owned by the Museo del Novecento, which has been reactivated and brought up to date for the occasion. Remarkable.
Roberto Cuoghi P(LXXXIIIPs)mm, 2024 Mixed media on wood, 180x180x2 cm Photograph: Jiayun Deng – Galerie Chantal Crousel Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel ©Roberto Cuoghi, by SIAE
John Bock: Mien–Gribbhom–Vienna–Milan, 1998–2026 Wood, fabric, various objects, video Museo del Novecento, Milan Photograph: Knut Claasen
Gabriella Ciancimino, Il Giardino della Chimera, 2026. Detail from the PAC. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Gilda Lavia. ©Gabriella Ciancimino. Photograph: Fausto Brigantino
Jacopo Benassi, Studio manifesta (detail), 2026. Wood, glass, fine art prints, plaster, modelling clay, dry branches, flags and acrylic; site-specific dimensions. Courtesy of Jacopo Benassi and Francesca Minini
Whilst Mika Rottenberg’s narrative, presented through her 2017 video installation Cosmic Generator, explores the surreal workings and despair of global hyper-capitalist commodification, other galleries opt for a path of spatial and biological metamorphosis. This is the case with the highly talented (we’re biased, of course) Gabriella Ciancimino, who transforms an entire space with Il giardino della Chimera (The Garden of the Chimera), a site-specific diorama of quantum bioenergetic art in which drawing, painting and assemblage merge in a dreamlike exploration of nature.
Equally radical is the approach of Jacopo Benassi, an artist who never does anything mundane. For the PAC, he has created the installation Studio manifesta (2026): his artist’s studio is conceived as a constantly shifting political and mental ecosystem, populated by works mounted on wheels that categorically reject the fixed nature of the wall and static contemplation, as if they were dynamic extensions of the body itself.
‘Art, when built on ruins, never ceases to resonate,’ Diego Sileo tells me as we say goodbye.
Cover image: Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (Loaded #3), 2017–2018, Single-channel video installation, sound and colour, 26’36” Ed. 6/6 + 1 artist’s variant © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Milanese, professional journalist, mother of two spirited teenage daughters, she loves to tell the 'glass half full' side of life—without ignoring any sediment at the bottom. For the past fifteen years, she has passionately covered cultural news, both Italian and international, and writes interviews for some of the leading Italian publications. A long-time contemporary art enthusiast, she’s also a hyper-organized travel addict. Lately, she has traded running for Pilates.
