Valerio Rocco Orlando

Valerio Rocco Orlando gave lectures and workshops in some of the most renowned faculties and institutions worldwide, among others: Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Rome; Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo, Bergamo; Accademia di Belle Arti, L'Aquila; Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem; Bocconi University, Milan; Brera Academy, Milan; Dongduk Women's University, Seoul; Ewha Womans University, Seoul; Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana; International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York City; Istituto Europeo di Design, Milan; IULM University of Milan, Milan; Kookmin University, Seoul; Korea Foundation, Seoul; MAXXI – National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Musei Capitolini, Rome; Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Parsons The New School for Design, New York City; Politecnico di Milano, Milan; The Valley School, Bangalore; Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan.

Valerio Rocco Orlando (born 1978 in Milan, Italy) is an Italian artist, Professor of Multimedia Dramaturgy at Brera Academy in Milan and PhD candidate in Engineering-based Architecture and Urban Planning at Sapienza University of Rome.

His collaborations include working with French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, English composer Michael Nyman, artists Gilbert & George, Ugo Rondinone and Liam Gillick, jazz singer Amalia Grè, supermodel Eva Riccobono, actors Saleh Bakri, Alba Rohrwacher, and psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja.

Since 2002 Valerio Rocco Orlando has worked on a number of community-based projects, creating different cycles of installations focused on the relationship between individual and collective identity.

His first project (The Sentimental Glance, 2002-2007) is a seven-channel video installation built like a stratified Bildungsroman populated by the portraits of six young women on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, passion and loneliness, melancholy, maternity and androgyny.

As art critic Caroline Corbetta has said,

"'Emotions and beauty are the weapons of Valerio Rocco Orlando’s utopia. The erudite aesthetic component of his works is not a sterile exercise in style but a necessary instrument (revolutionary?) of communication and participation. In his case, beauty is the name of a particular interaction between two beings, a ‘Self’ and an ‘Other’... Beauty and emotion imply an idea of movement: interior but also towards the 'Other'. Though he rapidly shifted from cinematography to art, in reality Valerio Rocco Orlando has continued to “do” cinema in the etymological sense of the term: indeed, kinema means movement. Entering the space sketched out by one of his video installations implies not only the movement of vision, but also of bodies and emotivity'."

In 2009 Valerio Rocco Orlando won the ISCP New York Prize promoted by Parc/Seat/Gai.

In 2011 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship and in 2014 he received an International Artist Fellowship at the MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea.

Valerio Rocco Orlando has exhibited widely and represented Italy at the 11th Havana Biennial (2012).

Dealing with themes such as the relationship between artists and society (The Reverse Grand Tour, 2012), the feelings of newer generations towards folklore (Bisiàc, 2007), the exchanges between a couple (Lover’s Discourse, 2010) and within a school as an institution (What Education for Mars?, 2011-2013).

Orlando carries out a personal exploration of portraiture, using the activities of meeting and dialogue as tools.

By defining art as a process of analysis and mutual knowledge, Valerio Rocco Orlando explores and tells everyday life stories, taken from personal and social context, recomposing them as the pieces of a mosaic within an image of the whole.

"'In order to investigate a universal theme, Valerio Rocco Orlando thinks, builds, and weaves relationships with the other, in such a direct and essential way that the artist’s main medium become the encounter itself. Einfülhung, what German philosophers refer to as empathy, is both a prerequisite and a direct consequence of the methodology of Orlando. Conceiving the production as a long-term process based on trust and intimacy, the audience gets to feel the other, participating in his points of view and feelings, by mirroring and questioning their own experience. Only through this new exchange with the viewer the research is completed and the artwork can respond to its function of radical education'."

Recent solo institutional exhibitions include: The Reverse Grand Tour, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2013); The Sphere of the Between, Korea Foundation, Seoul (2015); What Education for Mars?, Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2015); Portami al Confine, MUSMA, Matera (2016); Valerio Rocco Orlando, Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago (2017); Dialogue with the Unseen, MUDEC Museo delle Culture, Milan (2019).

Thanks to the Ministry of Culture (Italy)’s support within the Italian Council program, in 2021 Valerio Rocco Orlando founded an independent and transdisciplinary school in the heart of UNESCO Heritage Sassi di Matera, in the South of Italy; he created a digital platform and started the restoration of a building granted to him by the city of Matera for thirty years (South of Imagination, 2021-ongoing).

Orlando's works have been featured in Artforum, ArtReview, Contemporary (magazine), Corriere della Sera, Domus (magazine), Flash Art, Frieze (magazine), Il manifesto, La Repubblica, L'Uomo Vogue, Modern Painters (magazine), The Korea Herald, Vogue Italia and W magazine.

In 2016 the artist won the VII VAF Foundation Art Prize and his work was acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto.

Valerio Rocco Orlando's latest work (Dialogue with the Unseen, 2019) is a spiritual pilgrimage and a political journey to the Holy Land.

Starting from a collaboration with Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, this video installation is a collection of encounters between individuals who are questioning their own relationships with Nature and Society.