Imaginaries of the Atomic Age. An evening of talk and outdoor cinema

The Public Program dedicated to the exhibition “ICARUS” by Yukinori Yanagi continues on Thursday 3 July with Imaginaries of the Atomic Age, an evening of talks and outdoor cinema exploring how the trauma of the atomic age has been revisited and reinterpreted by artists and filmmakers. The event draws from key iconographic and cinematic references featured in the exhibition.

The evening begins at 7.30 PM with a lecture by art historian Toni Hildebrandt titled The Hiroshima-Fukushima Complex. Through a journey across international art from 1945 to the present, the lecture explores how the concepts of the “Atomic Age” and the “Anthropocene” have become increasingly intertwined in the work of contemporary artists, who have transformed experiences of destruction and annihilation into imaginaries of hope and transformation. The lecture will be in English.
Free admission on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration for the lecture opens at 7 PM at the museum’s front desk.
Reservations are available for Membership Card holders subject to availability – click here to book. To validate Member access, please arrive at least 30 minutes before the event starts. Late entry will not be permitted once the lecture begins.

Starting at 9 PM, the outdoor spaces of Pirelli HangarBicocca host a program of screenings of films that represent key references in Yukinori Yanagi’s work:

• CROSSROADS (1976) by American artist Bruce Conner: a film compiled from archival footage of the nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in 1946, known as Operation Crossroads. Accompanied by music from Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley, this piece is considered one of the most iconic works of experimental cinema. The slow pace of his editing (twenty-three shots of the same explosion in thirty-seven minutes) and the slow motion within the shots allow us to take in the effects of each explosion and repeatedly experience the terror and awe of the nuclear sublime.
• Godzilla (1954), directed by Ishirō Honda, is the first film in the iconic series centered around the giant monstrous creature that devastates the city of Tokyo, becoming an allegory for the destruction and uncertainty linked to atomic trauma. The film will be screened in its original Japanese version with Italian subtitles.
• The evening concludes with two episodes from the original television series Return of Ultraman, “The Monster Tamer and the Boy” (1971), and Ultraseven, “Ambassador of the Nonmalt” (1968). Created by Eiji Tsuburaya, the co-creator of Godzilla, these series, which became popular in Japan in the late 1960s, feature half-human, half-alien superheroes who embody the archetype of the Japanese hero: determined to fight to the limit against the outsider, the other, the one who threatens familiar certainties. The films will be in Japanese with English subtitles.

Free admission on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration for the screening opens at 8.30 PM at the museum’s front desk. In case of bad weather, the event will be held indoors.
Reservations are available for Membership Card holders subject to availability – click here to book. To validate Member access, please arrive at least 30 minutes before the event starts. Late entry will not be permitted once the screenings begins.

 

 

TONI HILDEBRANDT
Toni Hildebrandt studied art history, philosophy, musicology, and literature in Jena, Weimar, Rome, and Naples. He earned his PhD in Art History from the University of Basel in 2014 and is currently serving as the chair of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Bern. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Basel, Tokyo University of the Arts, and New York University, and has held fellowships at the Swiss Institute in Rome, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg. From 2021 to 2024, he coordinated a major project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation titled “Mediating the Ecological Imperative,” in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City.
In addition to numerous essays, he published a book on the “delimitation” of the art of drawing in the second half of the twentieth century, Entwurf und Entgrenzung: Kontradispositive der Zeichnung 1955–1975 (Munich: Fink, 2017), and co-edited, with Giovanbattista Tusa, a volume on Pasolini’s relationship to philosophy, PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher (Milan: Mimesis International, 2022). He is currently working on his new book, Art in the Atomic Age, 1945–2011.

BRUCE CONNER
Bruce Conner was born in McPherson, Kansas in 1933 and died in San Francisco, California in 2008. Conner received his BFA from Nebraska University before studying at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the University of Colorado. Conner was one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century, whose transformative work touched on themes of post-war American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse. Working in a range of mediums, Conner created hybrids of painting and sculpture, film and performance, drawing and printing, including works on paper utilizing drawing and collage. Conner came to San Francisco on the wave of the Beat Generation of the late 1950s, becoming an active member of the music scene during the late 1960s. In San Francisco, Conner became a singular practitioner within the underground film community and the flourishing San Francisco art world, achieving international status early in his career.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Please Enjoy and Return: Bruce Conner Films from the Sixties, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque NM (2018); Bruce Conner: Untitled Prints, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle WA (2018); Forever and Ever, Speed Art Museum, Louisville KT (2017); A MOVIE, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2017); Bruce Conner: It’s All True , Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; travelled to: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2016/17), among many others.
Selected public collections include: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY; Glenstone Museum, Potomac MD.