RISCHI MINORI

Giulia Piscitelli

January 2011 – April 2011

The Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea is pleased to present Rischi minori (Minor Risks), Giulia Piscitelli’s first exhibition in Rome and her most comprehensive to date. Curated by Stefano Chiodi, the show includes a vast selection of artworks which testify to one of the most original artistic practices in recent years.

Piscitelli directs an acute and often unpredictable gaze on contemporaneity, through the exploration of both the individual and collective everyday. The artist brings to the fore grotesque and paradoxical traits through a sharp yet melancholic sense of humour coupled with a strong sense of irony. Using a wide range of media, Piscitelli time and again operates with both the objectivity of the ethnologist and the empathetic participation of a privileged witness. The marginal areas of cities and their industrial outskirts become the ideal stage for her research, focusing on a dispersed and confused humanity, on its contradictory vivacity, which with its tics, obsessions and fragmented existential routine appears to incarnate a common condition of today.

The exhibition includes installations, video projections, photography, collage, “paintings”, and works on paper, in which themes dear to the imagination of the artist recur: the contrast between fragility and resistance, the domain of work and the body, myths of money and power, friction between the political dimension and subjectivity, the intrigue of time and memory. The entirety of Rischi minori includes, among other works, the complex installation, Protocollo, focused on the trauma of illness “disassembled” to its mental and physical components; a series of work uniforms coated in latex to the point of being transformed into phantoms of absent bodies; a selection of videos spanning the last two decades in which the artist turns her attention to the domestic sphere and the psychic dimension, devices of re-awareness whose task is to make visible traumas and conflicts; concluding with Neopolitan Windows: abstract reconfigurations of windows observed around the world. With Rischi minori Giulia Piscitelli offers a comprehensive frame for the complex facets of her work, with all the measure of its force and authenticity.

Giulia Piscitelli was born in 1965 in Naples Italy, where she lives and works.

Solo shows: 2009, Protocollo, Galleria Fonti, Naples. 2008, Ballhaus, curated by Salvatore Lacagnina, RISO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palermo. 2006, Selected video works 1989-2002, Galleria Fonti, Naples.

Group exhibitions include: 2010, Trailer Park, curated by Jörg Heiser, Teatro Margherita, Bari; Beige, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples; Strange Comfort (Afforded by the profession) curated by A. Szymczyk and S. Lacagnina, Kunsthalle, Basel; Barock, curated by E. Cicelyn and M. Codognato, Madre, Naples. 2009, Eppur si muove (And yet it moves), curated by I. Guerrero, J. Klaring, P. Vermoortel, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene. 2008, 50 Lune di Saturno, T2, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Turin; When things cast no shadow. 5th Berlin Biennial, curated by A. Szymczyk and E. Filipovic; Dai tempo al tempo curated by J. del Pesco, F. Parry, P. Uran, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene; Video Report Italia 2006.07 curated by Andrea Bruciati, Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone; Italia, Italie, Italien, Italy, Wlochy curated by G. Del Vecchio, A. Rabottini, E. Scipioni, A. Viliani, ARCOS Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Sannio; Camera con vista curated by A. Rispoli and E. Viola, PAN, Napoli; Fate presto, text curated by G. Fonseca, Complesso Monumentale di Santa Sofia, Salerno. 2007, Vesuvius, curated by G. Del Vecchio and S. Palumbo, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; 1997, Laboratorio Politico di fine secolo, curated by Gabriele Perretta, Teatro degli Artisti, Rome.