Martina Simeti

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.

– Excerpt from the text by Eva Svennung

In her practice Gaia Vincensini (Geneva, 1992) challenges the language of banks and chain stores, omnipresent in everyday landscape, deflating the solid image of corporations, and inserting their conventional symbols within an analogue autobiographical system. She analyses the individual within the community trough allucinate, comic-like drawings, etching prints, sculptures, embroidery and videos, combining and questioning the languages of craftsmanship and design. 

Amongst her most recent exhibitions: Des corps, des écritures – regards sur l’art d’aujourd’hui at the Musèe d’Art Moderne de Paris (Paris, 2022); Haunted Haus at the Swiss Institute (New York, 2020–21); Woshbourg at Weiss Falk (Basel, 2020). She was part of protect me from what I want at the Kunsthalle St. Gallen in 2019. In 2018 she had solo shows at Gaudel de stampa (Paris), at Forde (Geneva) and 1.1 Zeitgeist (Basel). In 2019, she was nominated for a bursary awarded by the City of Geneva. She was the winner of the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain of Geneva (FCAC) in 2017 and the Prix New Heads – Fondation BNP Paribas ART AWARDS in 2016.