Giulia Cenci at P/////AKT platform for modern artwork
In his 1922 poem “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot describes an acute aridity: “Right here is not any water however solely rock / Rock and no water and the sandy highway.” Giulia Cenci channels this concurrence of dryness and dying in an set up that takes its title from one other Eliot reference: dry salvages, 2023. The central set up includes varied sculptural assemblages in a syncopated unfold all through a big garagelike house that offers the scene the appearance of an abattoir. Every construction deploys variations of comparable parts—reclaimed bathe cabins, animal mannequins, a sculpted human head, the occasional natural matter—to recommend compartmentalized shows of the desiccated skeletons of unidentifiable animals.
Cenci intentionally positions these objects in order to recall the preservation strategies of dehydrated our bodies. By utilizing bathe cabins—parts historically related to hygiene—to encase them, the artist costs the fragments with a possible for water that can by no means be realized. Water makes life attainable, but it surely additionally represents a way of social management over the person, intimacy, and privateness, as symbolized by the reminiscence of our bodies which have handed by way of these bathe doorways.
Mixing in parts of horror and science fiction, Cenci creates a parallel world through which guests discover themselves to be the actors populating the room. The frosted glass obscures not solely the plaster sculptures, but in addition fellow viewers as they try to watch the scene. Extra slyly, the present serves as a fabric provocation on this metropolis well-known for its waterways, which just lately battled a drought so extreme that starvation stones began to disclose themselves amid the rocks upstream.
