On December 12, at 5:00 pm, on the occasion of the international opening in the exhibition hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Odessa there will be an artist-talk with the author about his motivation, behind the project "My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror – Odessa Episode".

Since 2018, Italian artist Gian Maria Tosatti has been working on the project "My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror", which focuses on the crisis of democracy and the relationship of the collapse of Western civilization. The project exists in the form of a visual novel and is realised in several "episodes". Each of them creates a portrait of a certain territory or city, which gives it a name.

The Odessa Episode – this comes after the Catania, Riga and Cape Town episodes - is the work that Tosatti developed after a long period spent in Ukraine. The many suggestions collected along this path have been composed to form a unique, strong vision.

In 2019, the artist began working in Ukraine to create the 4th episode of the project. The city he chose in his research became Odessa, and on Monday, December 14, an installation on the territory of Kuyalnik Estuary will be presented.

Anyway, this knowledge, this sense of disappearance is something deeply rooted, a sort of strange, disturbing gift that has affected the whole country and its citizens. In many cities or villages one can clearly perceive that there is a defective flow of time. Time seems slower than everywhere else or sometimes it seems to run outside of its usual mechanism. Odessa looks like a piece of land that has been shipwrecked in time.

Gian Maria Tosatti

The Blank Contemporary Art (Bergamo), and Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives (Kyiv) present the new work by Gian Maria Tosatti, Моє серце пусте, як дзеркало - одеський епізод (My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror – Odessa Episode), curated by Kateryna Filyuk and Alessandra Troncone, a project supported by the Italian Council (7th edition, 2019) programme to promote Italian contemporary art on a global level by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

Gian Maria Tosatti (Roma, 1980) is an Italian visual artist. He lives and works between Naples and New York.

His projects usually are long term investigations on specific topics related with the concept of identity, from the political to the spiritual standpoint.
His work consists mainly in large scale site specific installation conceived for entire buildings or urban areas. His practice involves often the communities of the places where he works.

In 2014, Domus magazine included his work "My Dreams, They Will Never Give Up" in the list of the 10 best exhibitions of this year.

In 2015 the international magazine ArtReview put him on the list of the 30 most interesting artists of his generation (Future Greats). Tosatti is also a journalist and a writer. He’s columnist for Corriere della Sera and the magazine Opera Viva. He writes essays about art and politics.

Artist-talk participants:
Gian Maria Tosatti , artist
Kateryna Filyuk, project curator (online)
Alessandra Troncone, project curator (online)

The Odessa Episode is one of the two parts of the project Diptych of the Trauma. This project is one of the chapters of the larger project My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror. The other work that composes the diptych is the Istanbul Episode that will be presented in May 2021. The local partner of the Turkish episode is DEPO and it will be curated by Devrim Kadirbeyoglu and Antonello Tolve.