Double Factor Identification
10.09.21 – 06.11.21
Opening 9 September, 4.30 – 8.30 pm
Download the text by Eva Svennung: ENG – IT
Martina Simeti is pleased to announce the first solo show by the artist Gaia Vincensini (Geneva, 1992), curated by Eva Svennung, featuring a series of new works.
Through hallucinated, comic-like drawings, etching prints, sculptures, embroidery and videos, Gaia Vincensini challenges the language of banks and chain stores, omnipresent in everyday landscape. She deflates the solid image of corporations, inserting their conventional symbols within an analogue autobiographical system. Through a practice that combines and questions the languages of craftsmanship and design, Vincensini reflects on issues analysing the individual within the community.
A scene captured by the artist through the window blinds of a Parisian apartment depicting a strip of bucolic urban landscape occupied by bodies engaging with one another on the sly while ‘exercising’. Or how limited access to outdoor public spaces during the last year and half somehow turned city life into a never-ending performance of the resilience so dear to our times – connected bodies exhaling an “I can bend like a reed!” became a frequent sight. Hence exercising outdoors as an alternative to tutorials indoors or Zoom, but also shopping, and going from A to B and back, as the only available breaks from the mental/home/office maze. Time outside felt as timed and formatted as a commercial. The videos will be trickled out a day at a time starting Monday in the format of a virtual film festival and following the addictive pattern of streaming services.* Depleted from crowds, some neighbourhoods looked like sterilised film sets in which décor, branding and upscaling attempts, but also collateral signs of rampant misery, came to the fore. As if corporate brands had always been here, before the people.
This mutation isn’t really news, but it’s become overwhelming. In this script or moodboard, the products that are (mis)placed are us. And it are these premises that inform part of Gaia Vincensini’s practice; an existential backdrop on which she deploys various techniques and filters of all kinds. A way to exert alternative powers and to oppose other possible narratives, other mental landscapes.