Ovid meets contemporary cinema in the rooms of the Galleria Borghese. From 15 September to 25 October, Isaac Julien’s All That Changes You. Metamorphosis accompanies and extends the major exhibition Metamorphoses. Ovid and the Arts, transforming ancient myth into an immersive experience. A British artist and filmmaker, Julien creates works in which cinema, photography, architecture, literature and memory intertwine to explore the present. Here, he takes Giulio Romano’s frescoes at Palazzo Te in Mantua as his starting point to investigate metamorphosis as a universal condition: human beings change, but so do nature, cultures and technologies. In the film, Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie play two enigmatic figures travelling across different eras and landscapes, from the Cosmic House in London to California’s ancient redwood forests. For the Borghese’s seventeenth-century Uccelliera, Julien has reinvented the original ten-screen installation as a single-channel work surrounded by mirrors: images multiply, fragment and transform before the viewer’s eyes. While the main exhibition explores how Ovid has inspired artists across the centuries, Julien brings that same idea into the present: metamorphosis is not simply a myth, but a way of understanding a world in constant transformation.
At Gagosian Rome, around fifty photographs reveal Francesca Woodman's poetic vision, where the body, space and Surrealism merge into images suspended between reality and dream.
Hito Steyerl: What Artificial Intelligence Doesn't Show
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