ArtVerona with Virginia Bianchi Gallery • Verona, Italy • 2022
Duo Show
Fair
“We experience events in an order, and perceive their relationship as cause and effect. They experience all events at once, and pereceive a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.”
Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life
Virginia Bianchi Gallery is pleased to take part in ArtVerona fair for the second consecutive year with a booth hosting works by artist Léa Porré and the duo Xenoangel (Marija Avramović and Sam Twidale). Through digital world (re)building and imaginary, speculative narrations, the exhibit wants to suggest a different, simultaneous perception of time, where the past and the present are taken as a starting point for the reimagining of our collective future.
Xenoangel, exhibiting for the second time with VBG after last year, are an artists duo composed of Marija Avramović (1989, Belgrade) and Sam Twidale (1988, Hereford). They began working together in 2017 and, despite their very different artistic background and skillsets – Avramović has degrees in Painting and Fine Arts, while Twidale studied music while self-learning programming - they found points in common in their fascination for video games and other-worldly realities. With inspirations that span from post-anthropocentrism to science fiction, Avramović and Twidale’s practice stands at the boundary between the digital and the real, creating virtual universes that embody the hybridisation and cross-culture of their intimacy.
At ArtVerona, Xenoangels are exhibiting a new body of work part of the wider installative corpus Trash Dwellers. Comprising a series of sculptures, sound and interactive real-time animations, the installation uses the language of sci-fi and speculative fiction to portray a new archaic community of Dwellers in an ecosphere of junk. Born of Trash, a real-time, interactive piece, is a search for the divine in the detritus: visitors join the protagonists of a new speculative tale aiming at provoking a positive reimagining, or (re)building, of our collective future. Part of this narration are also all the other elements of the installation: a VR immersive experience and a series of moist, trashy sculptural artefacts from the otherwordly reality.
In dialogue with Xenoangel, VBG hosts Léa Porré’s new series of works from her latest 3D World Build. In her artistic practice, Léa Porré (1996, Paris) delves into the realm of digital art as a way to reimagine and redefine history, particularly looking at the Long Middle Ages of her native country, France. Her production involves a critical re-reading of history through the lens of mythology, deeply rooted in her cyclical vision of time. Subverting conventional narratives that define historically iconic events and personalities, Porré composes alternative realities through a mystical, almost spiritual approach that causes a disruption of events as widely accepted. While distancing her practice from traditional historical research, she employs a transhistorical approach to connect events of the past and possible futures to worldwide mythological structures, creating a fluid, cyclical relation between what has been and what will be.
In Tis the beginning of all moist things, Porré weaves in different time dimensions through the symbolical presence of moss. A kind of botanical forgetting, the plant is time made visible, an evergreen blanket that covers the Earth and, with it, its past rituals and beliefs. Conversing with the distinctive iconographic and architectural elements that often recur in her works and world builds, moss becomes a colonising entity in a reality made of past and future remembrances. An ever-present entity in re-enchanting visions of desolate, speculative realities evoking civilisational collapse, concerns of ecocide and human extinction.
works by Xenoangel
Work commissioned:
• Tis the beginning of all moist things (2022)
