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Mara Palena. Project Room #1. The Window

Mara Palena. Project Room #1. The Window

In the history of recent art, the object has been declined in countless ways, assuming at times the function of provocation, fetish, document, anti-consumerist denunciation or conceptual presentation, to the point that its presence, at first invasive and disturbing, has become habitual. The question that arises spontaneously, every time we deal with works by artists who imply in various ways the centrality of objects, is: what will this aesthetic category of the existent have to say to our reflection and sensitivity, being so transversal to styles and poetics that it can be instinctively burdened by an a priori suspicion of inflation? The young Mara Palena (1988, lives and works in Milan), protagonist at the Studio G7 gallery in Bologna of the exhibition “The Window”, first episode of “Project Room”, an event dedicated to emerging artists on the contemporary scene aimed at promoting and disseminating national and international artistic research, launches herself with a certain courage into this challenge.

Mara Palena, “The Window”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

Mara Palena, “The Window”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and  Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

At the heart of the gallery exhibition, in fact, there is a video mounted on a canopy (ambiguous between a theatrical backdrop and the curtain of an old-fashioned bed) shot in the artist’s birthplace, in which our gaze enters as if we were in the room next to the one in which things happen and we saw them from an open door, with an intimacy that never borders on voyeurism. A meditative soundtrack, the result of a collaboration with the musician Nicola Ratti and part of his album “Automatic Popular Music” (2023), establishes the continuous mood of the film, accompanying our entry into a dimension similar to the one performed by Mara Palena in the video. Moving in the rooms crowded with memories for her, the artist has set herself the task of investigating the relationship between the body and the domestic space and the relationship with the objects that inhabit that space in a sense that we could define as “bio-conceptual”, first of all based on the programmatic expulsion from the horizon of the work of the emotional suggestion of that place dear to her since childhood. An arduous test, which constitutes the true performative engine of the dilated actions carried out by the artist in the video, such as walking, writing with a pen, looking out the window or looking around. It is as if she, exploring with her body such a familiar environment in a continuous tension between objectivity and returning affection, wanted to test her intuitions on the relational dynamics of the body in relation to objects on the most difficult terrain, the one in which the private sphere risks taking over at any moment, without allowing herself to be conditioned by her previous experience of that space where everything tries to happen as if for the first time.

Mara Palena, “Reprojected Movement”, 2024, video installation, 09 min. 45 sec., still frame, courtesy Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

Mara Palena, “Reprojected Movement”, 2024, video installation, 09 min. 45 sec., still frame, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

The film alternates zooms on details of her seen from the outside with subjective shots, in which the changing light during the day and alternating tones from black and white to color vision underline «the passing of time as a transformative act», she explains. And the transformation in progress is precisely that activated by this stream of consciousness, which models a lucid dream in which objects, witnesses to the passing of time and the movements of people crossing the space, cyclically take the stage and become subjects in their turn. The artist’s shots, in fact, are interspersed with frames in which they dominate the whole screen, almost mocking their own ostentatious self-referentiality through the gaze of the artist who, while faithful to the deliberate affective abstention mentioned above, always appears sweetened by an irresistible curiosity for their existence. Carefully chosen, they are unusual objects that capture attention, innocent in exhibiting themselves, sometimes from behind, on colored analog paper backdrops.

Mara Palena, “Reprojected Movement” #2 and #5, 2024, fine-art print on Hahnemühle Rice Paper 100 gr, cm 21x30, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

Mara Palena, “Reprojected Movement” #2 and #5, 2024, fine-art print on Hahnemühle Rice Paper 100 gr, cm 21×30, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

They are mostly decorative trinkets, such as a porcelain ballerina, a primitive seahorse, a golden shell with its pink interior open to offer a fake pearl, a glass marble, a miniature amphora or a plastic wedding cake figurine, but even when they could have functions, such as a juicer or a glass, they appear to have evaporated into a surreal nonsense. And it is precisely the fact that the conceptual intention of remaining focused on an almost abstract object-space and body-space relationship is continually undermined by the subjective time of memories that is at the origin of the autonomous impulse of objects to become characters, suspended in an undecided limbo between memory and invention. The result is a hypnotic loop animated by an indefinable sensation of “distanced tenderness”, of which the music unconsciously favors an experience of synaesthetic introjection. The film is accompanied by a series of printed video stills (entitled “Reprojected Movement”) in which the images of the objects, manipulated with different chromatic filters, appear set in translucent boxes, also evocative of a practice of reworking in which subjective time merges with universal time.

Mara Palena, “The Window”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

Mara Palena, “The Window”, installation view at Galleria Studio G7, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna

Finally, to delve deeper into Mara Palena’s approach, it is useful to move to the other room of the gallery, where we find some of her previous works on display, also focused on the reworking of the archive and memory through cut ups, the backbone of her research for several years. First of all, the photographic book “Oikeiôsis” (Witty Books, 2023) which brings together images taken by her at various moments in her life, to be browsed with a soundtrack dedicated to each thematic section downloadable through QR code. The project, more linked to psychological introspection, is a journey into grainy details of existence in which the micro, the macro, the private and the objective interpenetrate. Equally emblematic is the sculptural multiple “Il tempo entra ed esce ed io con lui” (2024), part of a larger project focused on the re-elaboration of sequences taken from the Prelinger Archives, an American public domain library, through the phases of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy, developed in the 1980s by Francine Shapiro and used to treat PTSD and other emotional conditions linked to trauma. Here the focus, as in the video “Reprojected Movement”, is on a psychic expansion of the perceptive limits linked to the image through performative procedures aimed at bringing out the mutable and imaginative nature of a memory treated as infinitely stratifiable material.

Info:

Mara Palena
Project Room #1 | The Window
curated by Laura Lamonea
11.01-01.02.2025
Galleria Studio G7
Via Val D’Aposa 4A, Bologna
www.galleriastudiog7.it


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