Artists: Jermay Michael Gabriel, Délio Jasse, Muna Mussie, Jim C. Nedd, Georges Senga
Exhibition title: Stratificazioni
Venue: ArtNoble Gallery, Milan, Italy
Date: June 15 – July 26, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and ArtNoble Gallery, Milan
ArtNoble Gallery is pleased to present Stratificazioni, a group exhibition that brings together the work of five international artists: Jermay Michael Gabriel, Délio Jasse, Muna Mussie, Jim C. Nedd and Georges Senga, accompanied by a critical text by Janine Gaëlle Dieudji.
All of them, through their artistic practice, bring to this group show the fragment of a story: a tale that has become research, that has become testimony to the world they have experienced. The multiplicity of reading levels that characterizes each work will be the connecting thread between the works: the exhibition pushes one to go beyond the aesthetic level and look further.
The word ‘stratifications’ on the one hand implies the presence of multiple levels, and on the other suggests a common sense. Stratificazioni is a title that wants on the one side to enhance the strong uniqueness that characterizes each artistic research, and on the other to suggest a meeting point between the five artists: the work of research, study of traditions and history, archival work, collection of testimonies, sometimes of denunciation, forms the basis for the realization of each work, pushing the viewer not to stop at the first glance, but to understand a world behind, hidden only in appearance.
A COLLECTIVE LABOR OF MEMORY
Text by Janine Gaëlle Dieudji
“One never begins in a pure space, but rather on a surface saturated with images and unexpressed thoughts.” Seloua Luste Boulbina 1
Stratum in geology are those striated layers of exposed rock often worked and eroded by passing waters across the slow flowing of time. These surfaces expose what is mostly unseen, buried within the earth’s surface. Stratificazioni is an exhibition that transcribes these notions of evidencing those undercurrents and exposing histories, and social fabrics as connected to voids and absences in historical memory. The layering of our realities leans upon critical fabulation of all of those individuals and cultural epistemologies that ground us.
Through the invitation of ArtNoble Gallery, artist Jermay Michael Gabriel turns his “carte blanche” into a collective response that engages politics and poetics, immersing the viewers in associative arrangements of words and letters (Muna Mussie), shapes and faces (Jermay Michael Gabriel, Georges Senga), abstract and untold stories (Jim C. Nedd, Délio Jasse) that entice an embodied and intuitive viewing process. Connecting memory’s influence on self-perception in relation to the inhabitance of space, these interventions represent an intimation of the realities we construct around ourselves and how we self-identify within and throughout these constructed spaces that are our here and now.
From photography, sculpture, textile and mixed media works, the exhibition invites us to rethink our approach to historical archives, to the political, the aesthetic or the social. Here, the act of embroidering, dismantling, burning, assembling and observing is the knot passing from one world to another, from traditional to contemporary, from past to present. Stratificazioni’s featured works share, transmit and build strong connections; while offering various interpretations that can reveal deeper histories and practices, they also bring a dramatical and theatrical dimension to everyday life.
A reflect of their personal experiences of the poetics of space, the group show Stratificazioni multiplies mediums and create a broader constellation of identity, nationality, politics and personal aesthetics, transforming the mundane into dream and melancholy. Embracing an active role as the producers of our own narrative and as those tasked with exposing all that lies beneath, this group of artists challenge notions of preservation and achievability by looking towards collective memory and the collective labor of memory. Visibility and presence are shifted in the perspective provided by these artists who look to vanishing points embedded within archives and their classification but also are intent on creating their own. To peel back the layers of social and cultural histories is to evidence those atmospheric tensions that shaped and continue to solidify the world around us.
Janine Gaëlle Dieudji, BHMF, The Recovery Plan
