Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Ivana Bašić, Leelee Chan, Nicki Cherry, Sarah Faux, Elizabeth Jaeger, Emiliano Maggi, Lucy McRae, Kemi Onabulé, Catalina Ouyang, Bryson Rand, Marta Roberti, Young-jun Tak
Exhibition title: Hovering
Curated by: Manuela Lietti
Venue: Capsule Venice, Venice, Italy
Date: April 6 – June 23, 2024
Photography: all images are copyrighted. Courtesy of the artist and Capsule Venice
For the second exhibition in its new Venetian space, Capsule Venice is delighted to present Hovering, a group show featuring the works of thirteen international artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Ivana Bašić, Leelee Chan, Nicki Cherry, Sarah Faux, Elizabeth Jaeger, Emiliano Maggi, Lucy McRae, Kemi Onabulé, Catalina Ouyang, Bryson Rand, Marta Roberti, and Young-jun Tak. The exhibition is curated by Manuela Lietti. For most of these artists this is their first collaboration with Capsule, emphasizing the gallery’s dedication to acting as a research incubator and platform for emerging artists, and as a space open to fostering new synergies and interactions with artists and other art institutions.
Encompassing the languages of painting, installation, video, photography, drawing, and sculpture, the works on view – mostly new commissions – reflect on the indeterminacies infusing contemporary life.
The title of the exhibition, Hovering, refers to the way in which the invited artists express these states of suspension between being and becoming, completion and incompleteness, latency and expression. Their practices grow out from gendered, bodily, and spatial perspectives, shedding new light on the ways in which the embrace of liminality defines these perspectives, and our present more generally. The forms of ‘in-betweenness’ presented in the exhibition are multiple and do not necessarily resolve into a unique synthesis, but rather activate a cyclical movement in which the embrace of ambivalence and contingency becomes the preferred ontological register.
The refusal of resolution that informs the exhibited works often concerns the individual body, as well as the threshold between quotidian and intuitive – even mystical – experiences, and the false binary of universal and personal realms. A body, considered from a human or even a subatomic level, is not merely a vessel, but a semipermeable membrane capable of expanding and adjusting, existing as the self and Other simultaneously.
The works ‘Grip’ and ‘Desire Stages’ by Nicki Cherry show what happens when we embrace, rather than resist, our corporeality, in both its overt and hidden dimensions. Cherry’s bodies – which resemble fossils or minerals move between regeneration and decay, pleasure and pain, the fulfillment of desire and the fear of abandoning ourselves to it.
The reduction or dissolution of the body is not understood as synonymous with its complete loss, but rather as a moment of radical potential and transformation. Transcending the idea that wholeness is the only determining feature of our individual nature lies at the core of Ivana Bašić’s ‘Pneumatic Positions II: Blossoming’ as well as Sarah Faux’s works ‘Closer’ and ‘Bright lights and black spots’, which capture the intrinsic tension between matter and idea, the transient and the carnal.
The expression of interstitial dimensions can also be conveyed by the ways in which our bodies interact with the outside world. Kemi Onabulé, Elizabeth Jaeger and Bryson Rand offer examples of this approach. The protagonists of ‘Object of Love’ and ‘Time Escapes Me’ by Kemi Onabulé are almost totemic figures expressing a way of being in the world as they negotiate feelings of belonging and of placelessness, blending the sensations of loneliness and togetherness, of singularity and collectiveness, and the profoundly liminal experiences such as pregnancy and motherhood. ‘Escape’ by Elizabeth Jaeger portrays a process of negotiation between space, the individual, and emotions. Endowed with an almost pictorial feeling, this ceramic work depicts a non-existent, although distinctive place, lingering between fact and fiction, reality and simulation, inside and outside; her work for this show is characterised by a sense of emotive suspension. The black-and-white photographs of Bryson Rand pay homage to people, communities, and spaces that have direct ties to queer photographic histories. Under Rand’s lens, they become sites of allusion, meeting points, axes defining what lies below or above.
Metamorphosis, if seen as a transformative force, is a crucial aspect investigated in the show by conveying the body itself as a transitional meta-scape, a rite of passage in the works of Emiliano Maggi and Marta Roberti. Informed by a fascination for iconographic, but, most of all, semantic hybridisations between, for example, the human, animal and plant realms, Maggi and Roberti both capture the viewer in a continuous chain of associations in which history, myth, legend, and popular wisdom harmonically interweave.
Ambivalence as a form of ‘in between’ state that reverses conventional binary logic informs the works of Morehshin Allahyari and Young-jun Tak. In ‘Moon-Faced Velvet Fragments I’ and ‘Moon-Faced Velvet Fragments II’ Allahyari uses AI to reverse the gender biases that have entered Persian society by means of Western influences. Young-jun Tak’s ‘Love Your Clean Feet On Thursday’, complemented by the sculptures ‘Miracles (Twin)’ and ‘Chained (Twin)’, creates visual puns that evoke latent ambivalences and (apparent) discontinuities between the worlds of the hyper-masculine and the hyper-feminine, and between the sacred and the profane.
The constant state of indefiniteness between material and the spatial lies at the core of Catalina Ouyang’s and Leelee Chan’s contributions. Ouyang’s ‘Untitled’ and Chan’s ‘Blindfold Receptor (Crawling Jewel–Moss III)’ offer powerful examples of how forms cohere gradually and progressively through incorporation, modification, and adaptation processes inscribed, in the words of Catherine Malabou, within the paradigm of the ‘plasticity of forms’. This concept can be seen as a strategy for survival.
The exploration of entities hovering between dimensions takes a highly speculative path in ‘Delicate Spells of Mind’ by Lucy McRae, a scenario in which she portrays the body as a prototype, a mechanism of resilience and healing moving between stages of perception, and within which movement, ritual, and form create loci of healing and an invitation to dialogue.
The exhibition thus aims to reflect new expressions of consciousness and awareness that are not defined simply by rendering accepted boundaries as dialectical, porous, or unstable, rather accepting that unresolvedness and inconclusiveness can express aspects of a process of growth. Under such circumstances, the act of procrastination can become a space for interior germination rather than mere involution or laziness; failure itself may prepare the ground for resolution. Uncertainty is an intrinsically speculative geography wherein humankind can endeavour towards new thresholds that remain open, slippery, and unfixed. We are always hovering.
