CRISTIANO BERTI
www.cristianoberti.it
participant in
VAD – Video Art Database
SFC – Shoah Film Collection
NewMediaFest’2010 – A Virtual Memorial Foundation
Cristiano Berti (Turin, 1967) began to work as a painter and sculptor in 1987, shortly after obtaining his diploma at the Primo Liceo Artistico and enrolling with the Faculty of Architecture at Turin University, where he graduated several years later. His son Samuel was born in 1992. His first exhibition, in 1993, was a personal exhibition at the Premio Salvi in Sassoferrato (Italy). Alongside his artistic activity, he studied history of technology, publishing various specialist papers. From the mid-1990s he worked on a mobile unit for health risk reduction among migrant sex workers, an experience which, years later, was to form the basis of various visual art works. At the end of the 1990s he stopped working as an outreach worker, though continuing to work professionally in the sphere of social inclusion and gender empowerment. He also moved away from traditional artistic techniques, trying out new technologies and in particular working with laminated plastic. His first exhibition at the Galleria Carbone in Turin in 2000 grew out of his work in plastic laminates. Shortly afterwards he definitively abandoned painting and developed his interest in photography, video and the installation of re-contextualised objects. In comparison with the past, he also placed greater emphasis upon collaborative work, interactions and artistic acts. In these last works he often uses different kinds of language and media in order to construct systems of signs and meanings in which formal appearance becomes more complex, contradictory, or ambiguous.
He is married and lives and works between Jesi and Turin.