PARASOMNIE-LITURGIE
AGNE RACEVICIUTE AND DEVOCKA
Photo: Keizo Ueno
Opening 21.06.2023, 6pm-9pm
Until 29.06.2024
Following the coordinates of the topography of the psyche, in which art becomes a legend of the schizophrenias of the ego, the exhibition intends to restore the paradox of the hybridization between two apparently antithetical principles: the nightmare and the sacred. Along a path of cathartic awareness of one’s psycho-emotional condition, the viewer is invited to unhinge the concluded horti of the mind, in which the sclerotization of a pretended rationality of living inhibits the search for the intimate nature of being. In the works exhibited, the somatization of one’s psychosis in the expressive plasticity of forms, and the dimension of the sacred mediated by art in its material and evanescent nature, become the plot of a private and collective experience. It aims to suspend the balance around the ego in order to investigate its contradictions and unveil hidden and buried removals in the narrowest and most recondite spaces of consciousness. These works portray bodies of dreams and liturgies of the psyche. In the dark chamber of our being, the images of your imminence in time are reflected by an opaque and murky light. In the cave of the unconscious, the essence of non-being becomes the stuff of nightmares.
Agne Raceviciute [Klaipedia, Lithuania, 1988]
Agne lives and works between Milan and Venice. In 2009 he won the residency at the ateliers of the Bevilacqua LaMasa foundation, the year from which he began his artistic research path. Subsequently, she exhibits in several Italian institutions and foundations: Galleria Comunale d’arte Contemporanea in Monfalcone, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Marsèlleria, Cripta747, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, MAN in Nuoro, Villa Manin, Viafarini, MART in Rovereto and in as many international group exhibitions such as at KCCC in Lithuania, Kunsthalle Goppingen in Germany and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Agne Raceviciute’s research ranges between photography, installation and video, but the process becomes even broader when she tackles long-term projects. The confluence of techniques leads us to a path and narrative that never reveals its identity, starting with experimenting with concepts.’’A liturgy is about to take place in a room under a building, across the bridge, near the canal. Unaware that beneath the ground a few meters away is a place that plots and welcomes, engulfs us and takes us beyond the blackness of the candle. On display is the work “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born,” and here the sacrilege begins.Three sealed drawings are exhibited Her snare , Access, We see him melt in.A triptych extracted from a complex of unpublished works related to thelatest film project Cut the Primacy-Embrace the doubt. Three icon boards represent the film’s protagonists and Access; an indivisible reality between the two individuals.The ritual is completed with the sound installation (30min) that catapults us into another dimension out of time and space, with delicate and subtle boundaries.
Devocka [Verbania, Italy, 1996]
The emerging and experimental artist works in Milan as a fashion designer and in parallel conducts an artistic research based on the obsessive embodiment of nightmares and phobias peculiar to human beings, through the production of sculptures, paintings and performances. This path develops from the conception of Devocka, a hybrid creature born at the turn of 2019 and 2020 as a means of exorcising personal manifestations of parasonnia; a pathology related to episodic sleep disturbances, which occur during specific phases of sleep-wake transit. Devocka is a device of self-possession and alteration, a vehicle for the manipulation and passage of chilling dreams that he calls Wraiths: the presence of these is manifested through the black color that envelops his works to reveal them as an expression of a supernatural manifestation. Through the recurrent use of latex, silicone, paint, and hair, the horror and grotesque aesthetic that has always been intrinsic to his cultural and personal background, he characterizes and defines the works with disinhibition and extreme violence. the intent is to arouse such revulsion in the viewer as to beguile him and induce a raw confrontation with his innermost and unconscious fears.
