ITALIANO

Ongoing exhibition   /  OHMvideo   / Exhibition’s Archive
DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE 2009-2015

Musée de l’OHM (Opening Here Museum) is an artist’s museum founded inside a chest of drawers from the XIX century, hosted since 2009 by the Medieval Museum of Bologna. The idea of creating an opera that is at the same time a museum itself, the place where meaningful works for a community are collected and displayed, and to choose a piece of furniture as the structure for this apparent paradox, is generated by the need of expliciting the link between the personal and the public spheres. The way the OHM is organized is based on the typical architecture from the ancients in Pompei, casa-bottega, that bridged the dwelling and the working place in a single building. Following the same scheme, the Opening Here Museum is structured in this way:

Top drawer: it corresponds to the pergula of the casa-bottega, the top floor where the family used to live, and it is the place in the museum hosting temporary exhibitions.

Mid drawer: it corresponds to the negotium  of the casa-bottega, the so called “marketplace”. This has been removed in order to symbolise the relation with the economic sphere “in absence”, with a hole in the body of OHM. Through the space created by the removal of the mid drawer, it is possible to see the collection of objects kept in the bottom drawer:

Bottom drawer: called secreta it is the warehouse where the permanent collection is kept together with small personal objects coming from private contributions. It is generally closed but its content becomes visible through a glass window in occurrence of the negotium removal. The collection can be explored by asking the key of this drawer to the reception of the Medieval Museum. To see the collection online clic HERE.

The outside surface has been carved during the happening Significato where etching tools where offered to the visitors of the neon>campobase gallery (Bologna 24/09/2009). This performance was conceived as a sort of Christening, but is also referred to Marina Abramovic’s performance Rithm 0 (1974), during which she allowed people to act on her body with different tools of pleasure and torture. Being torture prevaling then and now on human bodies, the founder has tried to “put things back in their place”.

The back side is the technical office, with works of various artists conceived in order to increase the user-friendliness of the museum. The hole on the right side (Buco Bello, Cuoghi e Corsello 2012) can be used to post claims to the Direction.

—

I started the OHM project at the neon>campobasegallery on the 24th september 2009; right afterwards I kicked off the activity of the museum at the Medieval Museum of Bologna, with the solo show Mostra Personale; in 2010 I created the Association Musée de l’OHM that has conducted the annual exhibition programme, appointing every year an art director. All the process can be considered an experiment of social sculpture, and has at the same time increased the interest towards OHM as a museum. The direction of OHM was held by the historycian Massimo Marchetti (2010 to 2012), by Marc Giloux (2013) who presented every exhibition with a “critical performace“, and in 2014 by the independent curators Mario Manfredini, Fulvio Chimento, Lelio Aiello, Elisa Del Prete, Katia Baraldi, Carmen Lorenzetti. OHM has held exhibitions of: Alessandra Andrini, Riccardo Beretta, Luca Bertolo, Chiara Camoni, Barbara Cardella, Debora Cavazzoni, Giulia Cilla, Daniela Comani, Cuoghi e Corsello, Caroline Demarchi, Giuseppe De Mattia with Archivio Aperto, Francesco Di Tillo, Dragoni Russo, Alessandro Ferri (DADO), Alessandra Frisan, Francesco Fuzz Brasini, Il Prufesur, Sungho Kosugi, Matej Kren, Jean Louis Lagnel, Marine Leautaud, Jiyoun Lee, Hiroki Makino, Giancarlo Norese, Astridur Josefina Olafsdottir, Giada Patarini, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mili Romano, Martina Scalvini, Orlando Tignatello, Rui Zhang. Together with them have contributed to the collection: Riccardo Camoni, Claudio Cappi, Paola Falasco, Emilio Fantin, Giorgio Forni, Lorenzo Mazzi, Luigi Presicce, Andrea Renzini, Anna Rossi, Valentina Vetturi and other contributions from my private collection.

Cultural and educational activities are carried out in partnership with MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. From 2015 OHM is part of  the permanent collection of the Istituzione Bologna Musei.

Musée de l’OHM c/o Museo Civico Medievale, via Manzoni 4, Bologna

Opening hours: >>