Gaia Vincensini
Double Factor Identification
10.9.21 – 6.11.21
Opening 9 September, 4.30 – 8.30 pm
Text by Eva Svennung: ENIT 

Through hallucinated, comic-like drawings, etching prints, sculptures, embroidery and videos, Gaia Vincensini deflates the solid image of corporations, omnipresent in everyday landscape, inserting their conventional symbols within an analogue autobiographical system. Combining and questioning the languages of craftsmanship and design, Vincensini analyses the individual within the community.

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. 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. [Excerpt from the text by Eva Svennung]

 

Gaia Vincensini was awarded the Manor Cultural Award in 2020. This same year she published The Riddle with Nieves, and was invited to a residency in the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In June 2021, she held her first institutional solo show in Geneva at the MAMCO. Amongst her most recent exhibitions are 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. 

Together with Eliott Villars and Kim Coussée, she founded a collective project focusing on printmaking, embroidery and clothing called INNER LIGHT. They exhibited at the Heinzler Rezsler Gallery, (Lausanne), the salon de Normandy (Paris), at No conformism (Milan), and more recently they staged their first solo exhibition NO HOLIDAYS in Tunnel Tunnel (Lausanne). They aim to explore the tension between mass-produced garments and pre-industrial techniques.