UFOs at the Open Eye!

By Colin Serjent

A leading figure in Italy's new generation of artists, photographer and film-maker Francesco Jodice, will be looking for evidence of UFOs, when he visits Liverpool, during the city's 2004 Arts Biennial, the UK's largest international festival of contemporary art. He has been commissioned by the Open Eye and the Biennial to produce a new body of work in Liverpool.

"During the last seven years his creative explorations have centred on human social behaviour and transformations in the human landscape," said Open Eye manager David Williams. "He has utilised photography, film, written texts, interviews and maps to unravel the interweaving stories of our everyday realities, looking at how we identify and interact with our environments and others."

The exhibition, his first in this country, will form part of the International section of the event. The main room at the Open Eye will house large format prints, including night visions of local landscapes, with the adjoining room showing film projections, which will include interviews with people who live on Merseyside, as well as people who have witnessed UFOs in the region.

As part of his research, he has contacted local UFO societies, who have recorded up to 300 such instances of UFO sightings.

"As far as I am concerned in my exhibitions," said Jodice, who has shown previous work in Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona and New York,the quality of the story is paramount."

He is a founding member of Multiplicity, an international network of artists and architects, and recently wrote and directed his first 35mm film, The Gift.

His exhibition runs throughout the duration of the Biennial (18 September - 28 November).