The Column

The Column

2013 Video, 24:44 min, sound

The Column came out of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a restorer, who needed a new marble sculpture for a castle he was restoring. Somebody told him that it could be done in China, because they have good marble, good craftsmen, cheap labour, and they can be quick because they can actually do the work while the marble is being transported by boat. I found it terrific. It sounded so weird, simultaneously sick and fabulous, something mythological and at the same time in keeping with the capitalistic logic of profit merging the time of production with the time of transport. Of course, one of the elements that I found stimulating with The Column was the production of a classical Western column model by a group of Asian workers on a voyage from China towards Europe. It is in a sense, for the column, a kind of “homecoming.”

Adrian Paci

Adrian Paci (Scutari, 1969) graduated in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts  in Tirana. Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Milan. Using a variety of  languages such as video, installation, painting and photography, Paci reflects  on the existential condition of dislocation, of the loss and rediscovery of one’s  own origins, with an immediacy that often verges on irony. This research leads  him to investigate the role of the artist and the nature of the work of art, in a  continuous celebration of the everyday. Paci has held exhibitions in various  international institutions, such as the Kunsthalle Krems (2019); MAXXI - Museo  nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2015); MACM - Musée d’art  contemporain de Montréal (2014); Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris  (2013) and MoMA PS1, New York (2005). His work has been included in the Bi City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen (2017); International Art  Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2014, 2005, 1999); Busan Biennale (2014);  Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon (2009) and Biennale of Sydney (2006),  among others. His works form part of international collections such as the  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, New York; MoMA -  Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;  Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fundación la  Caixa, Valencia; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.