Representing Australian at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Marco Fusinato is a contemporary artist and experimental musician recognised for his dark, energised works. His practice explores the rhetoric of extremism in discourses such as radical politics, art, music and sound.
Read MoreMarco Fusinato often incorporates physically affecting elements in his works, which encompass installation, performance, recording and photographic reproduction. The works often include intense light and amplified noises.
Fusinato explores the intersection of art and sound, prompting unconventional modes of experiencing and producing art and music. Parallel Collisions (2008), for example, can be both viewed as a work of art or heard as a sound piece: the 24-part score consists of collaged images, magazine clippings and musical notations. When playing, musicians improvise with their own interpretations of the images using instruments of their choice, and throw each sheet on the floor once done with it.
Similarly, Fusinato works against linear progression in Mass Black Implosion, a series of scores ongoing since 2007. Taking reproductions of scores by avant-garde composers, among them Anestis Logothetis, Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis, Fusinato draws straight lines from each note to a single convergent point. The new composition instructs the performer(s) to play every note at once, flattening the duration of time embedded in the original scores.
The viewer or the audience also becomes an active participant in Fusinato's work, as with Constellations. First presented in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, the work involves hitting a plastered wall with a baseball bat, whereby the sound of the strike was amplified at 120 decibels by the microphones hidden behind the wall. The title refers to the multiple particles released by the burst of energy from each strike, and the parallel qualities of destruction and perfection.
Ongoing since 2009, Double Infinitives and The Infinitives comprise large-scale black aluminium sheets over which Fusinato has printed images of riots. Each photograph, hailing from a different part of the world, depicts the moment at which an individual holds up or is about to release a rock. Presented in the large scale of history paintings, Fusinato uses the work to address the relationship between mass media and politics.
Living and working in Melbourne, Fusinato has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Select solo exhibitions include THIS IS NOT MY WORLD, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (2019); Constellations, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2015); The Color of the Sky Has Melted, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Artspace, Sydney (2012); Marco Fusinato: Ripping Skies 2010, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch (2010).
Select group exhibitions include AUSTRALIA. ANTIPODEAN STORIES, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2019-20); SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Photographs and photograms, Hamish McKay, Wellington (2018); The National 2017: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017); All the World's Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Soundings: A Contemporary Score, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013).
Marco Fusinato's website can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
