Diego Tonus
Diego Tonus (b.1984, Italy) studied Visual Arts at IUAV University, Venice, and at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Solo shows and presentations include those at Ca’ Pesaro Museum Venice (2024); CSAC Parma (2023); Whitechapel Gallery London (2020); STROOM Den Haag (2019); Van Eyck Maastricht (2019); Ellen de Bruijne Projects (2018); ar/ge kunst Bozen (2017); Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2013). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at TENT Rotterdam (2020); Kasteel Oud-Rekem (2019); MAMbo Bologna (2018); Rome Quadrennial (2016); WIELS Brussels (2015); De Appel Amsterdam (2015); CCA Singapore (2014); Palais de Tokyo Paris (2013); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Turin (2013) and Kunstverein Nürnberg (2013). His films have been presented internationally including at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles (2016) and Kunsthalle Gwangju (2011). Tonus has been awarded residencies at Van Eyck Maastricht; WIELS Brussels; Fondazione Spinola Banna Poirino; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Venice and Real Presence Belgrade. He has been nominated for awards including the PAC – DGCC (2021); Italian Council (2018); Live Works Centrale Fies (2015) and the Furla Award (2012). Among his publications: From State To State (Electa, 2023); Never Again (Mousse Publishing, 2020); Fragments of a Conversation with a Counterfeiter (Roma Publications Amsterdam, 2019); The Presidents’ Hammers (Roma Publications Amsterdam, 2018); I, the Dog of my Master (MER.Paper Kunsthalle 2015) and Five Cases of Intrusion (Archive Books Berlin, 2014). Selected public collections: CSAC Parma; MAMbo Bologna; MAXXI Rome; MMoMA Moscow.
Within his artistic practice, Diego Tonus focuses on reproduction as a tool of investigation to question control systems and power structures by transforming images, objects and collective experiences he selects, in order to put them in a new process of thought and present their underlying structures of codification and normativity. Tonus’s mix-media practice is based on archiving seen as a form of obsessive and creative gesture. This method characterizes the artist’s way of observing events, through the making of sculptures, photographs, performance and film, articulating an approach that defines a process/time based artistic production. Either working with film or journalistic writing (whereby editing allows the re-telling of an individual experience by altering it), voice (wherein precise pitch and modulation techniques influence listener’s unconscious reaction), performance or sculpture (wherewith a specific subject and its history are questioned through the presentation of their new originals), the research of Diego Tonus analyses the balance between narrative’s modes and the content, showing or revealing how much narrative structure is, above all, an instrument of influencing and manipulation of both the public and the object.
