APRIL: Group Show | Giorgia Alliata via UMARELL | Residency

APRIL is a twelve-person group show organized by Giorgia Alliata via UMARELL and hosted by Nguyen Wahed Gallery. It presents eighteen artworks in the basement of the gallery, which was lit up as a parallel exhibition space for the duration of the show. The room is small and still appears to be empty, even though it contains several objects and images. The pipes are used as directions for the lights installed, and the wall, although painted white, has orange dust remnants from its brick structure. “It feels like I have to find something.”

Entering the space is complicated and one has to keep the head down, but once below it feels there is space to walk around, to look up and crunch down, to move slowly and to go through it several times, until you notice a painting that leans against one of the walls, seamlessly matching the color of the wall, but with a different relief. Next to it, a ping pong ball is holding an image of an upper body. It is a tiny one. You look up and there are nine tiles containing marbles forming a square on the ceiling above you. Behind, a pedestal with sharp edges, with even sharper metal curled on top of it.

Move forward: a pair of red boots next to a line of 22 brown bags that each contain 1000 leaves, single-counted by an artist who performed in the space before the show was installed. They fit between the connecting points of a tube that crosses on the lower part of the wall. You notice circles for the second time. When you look again, these four circles are present in every top-right corner of each wall of the space, with varying internal movements. A classroom roll-down is elegantly placed on the wall above the brown bags, hiding two things behind, again very small ones.

The door next to it is black. A picture of a mannequin bust on the street is stuck on it, close to its locks. And then you are back to the moment where you first entered, and to your right is a slide projector, an image inside of it, and then a drawing of two forks wrapped in transparent plastic, and then two planks of wood that depict two spoons, and then a shelf containing shoes, and then a cow's udder with a sad face fired onto its right leg, and, finally, slightly below two other planks of wood marking the suspension of that corner and resting somehow onto themselves.

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