Scapegoats
At a time when societies increasingly appear to have abandoned any pretense of social coherence around an equitable distribution of resources and instead have solidified extreme inequality by representing a group deemed to be outsiders who merit extreme violence, Scapegoats is a proposed exhibition of works by artists whose work touches upon the increasing use of this ideological narcotic.
Athens Sanctuary
Athens Sanctuary by Richard C. Ledes and Alisha Trimble is a video installation and a limited series of 60 x 90 cm light boxes. The video installation is a tetratych, built around two Greek tragedies, interpreted as dance by Alisha Trimble and performed in a marble quarry outside Athens. The two tragedies were chosen by Ledes because the main character in each one is a non-citizen. The light boxes are 60 x 90 cm. Each one displays an image that documents the process of filming in the quarry which itself resembles an ancient Greek theater.
Diritto di sangue / Rovescio di sangue Right of Blood/Wrong of Blood
The work of Marina Sagona entitled Diritto di sangue / Rovescio di sangue (in English Right of Blood / Wrong of Blood) is about the law that in Italy allows people with Italian ancestors to become citizens with relative ease, while denies the same right (translated as Diritto in Italian) to people who are born in Italy from foreign people who have gone to school and have been working there for a long time. The work sheds light on a racial paradigm that privileges the category of race over lived experience within a community. Immigrants who have lived in their communities for decades are sacrificed as scapegoats while the rights of new applicants are privileged based on a hierarchy that weaponizes foreignness in a way that benefits those holding power.
Strange Fruits
The work by Mimma Scarpini entitled Strange Fruits evokes the long history of lynching in the United States as a form of extreme violence upon members of the African American community. It is an abstract work featuring an obscure object, revolving on itself and hanging from above like a fruit — a strange fruit — and as in the song, as a metaphor for a lynching. Like in Holiday's work, the sublimation of this historical trauma into a symbolic rendering by Scarpini facilitates the re-inscription of this historical trauma in a deceptively simple and lyrical form that facilitates memory instead of erasure.
Shelters
Shelters is a group of three-dimensional, organically shaped jute sculptures arranged in dialogue with one another. Evolving from abstract forms into models for human-scale dwellings, they explore the relationship between individual and collective space. Suggesting permeable architecture that balances privacy with openness, Shelters envisions an abstract utopian village where architecture becomes a catalyst for connection, coexistence, and community.