Agnese Galiotto at Johanne

Artist: Agnese Galiotto

Exhibition title: A gift

Venue: Johanne, Frankfurt, Germany

Date: December 7 – 12, 2018

Photography: Agnese Galiotto and Ivan Murzin / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Johanne, Frankfurt

By living, each of us constantly question our past. From time to time, we happen to close our eyes, to get some slack from the present, and to reopen them in a world of shadows. Now, nailed by time, it seems to be inoffensive. So we question it, and it unveils to us its own meanings, its reasons, the same meanings and reasons that we would have wanted to know when we were still on time. It’s a vantage point, the one of who is looking back, but it’s frustrating as well, because it’s already too late. The day has fled, the emotion vanished. The shell is still there, but the fruit is gone. With time, nothing will be left of the shell too.

Agnese has collected some of her memories, and she has then filled them with her own self. She has poured the present in them, and the present has outlined new shadows and new lights in the embalmed casings. In the age when everything is short, Agnese is questioning if it’s possible to make sure our past becomes something more than an empty house, with locked doors. So she picks up the fragments, she cleans them, and she turns them into symbols. There is contact with the other, as deep as enigmatic the other may appear. There is the experience of death, and the sinister suspect that destiny is meaningless, in the end. There’s life, with its beauty and bitterness, sprouting and blooming and that, even if it’s just for one day, it leaves us stunned by its smell.

Many times a gift is just a banal object, an unremarkable event, that can be easily lost among all the other objects and events in life. But it’s the meaning we recognize to it, the exclusive relationship we feel between it and us, that makes it last while the rest disappears. Each of us chooses their gifts. Each of us chooses what to keep safe, and what to be grateful for.

-Elvira Fiore