The MAB – Contemporary Art Centre of Bari Sardo presents, from 4 October to 30 November 2025, the group exhibition Archaeology of the Present – body, matter, memory, curated by Carla Carta, Michela Melis and Nicoletta Zonchello (Artistic Director of MAB).

The exhibition brings together eighteen artists who, through diverse languages—from sculpture to painting, from photography to digital media—explore an archaic and universal sensibility that links body and earth, gesture and ritual, time and material.

The project arises from a survey of contemporary artistic practices which, despite their diversity, appear to converge within a shared field of resonance: a memory that precedes the word and is transmitted through gesture, matter and sign.

In the selected works, primary materials such as iron, ash, stone and wood emerge, not only as technical means but as elements dense with cultural and symbolic stratification. Iron, in particular, recurs as an implicit reference to a long history of transformation: in Sardinia, introduced during the late Nuragic period, it marked an epochal transition, opening the way to new techniques, exchanges and forms of contact with the Other, from the Phoenicians to the Etruscans.

Alongside this material dimension, paintings and images reveal primordial symbols—graphic signs, imprints, archetypes—that point to an archaic, non-verbal language. A fragmentary, non-linear script that traverses media and formats, reconnecting the image to ancient and universal gestures.

The digital, present in some of the works, appears as a new trace: another form of matter that gathers and transforms ancestral memories into contemporary visual languages, revealing how technology itself can become heritage and sign.

These practices, far from folklore or ethnographic reconstruction, belong fully to the contemporary. At times they evoke a return to ritual gesture, at others a shamanic tension, or an assertion of matter as resistance to time and oblivion.

The exhibition unfolds as a sensitive geography of material and iconic constellations, inviting the visitor to enter a dimension where time, gesture and matter converge, and where art becomes threshold, surpassing representation.

Nicoletta Zonchello, Artistic Director MAB

Participating artists
Alessandra Catta, Carla Carta, Teresa Carracoi, Olivier Cazenove, Salvatore Delogu, Taras Halabourda, Stefania Lai, Davide Manca, Riccardo Mantelli, Michela Melis, Amalia Nilda Nieddu, Elettra Norfo, Luisa Pistidda, Riccardo Pitzalis, Susanne Rikus, Monica Spanedda, Carlotta Tola.