Discover the show Trisha Baga, the eye, the eye and the ear on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca until 19 July 2020
Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Trisha Baga’s solo exhibition “the eye, the eye and the ear”, comprising of video installations and ceramic sculptures, which form a sequence of unusual and thought provoking narratives: from science-fiction and the popstar Madonna to ancient myths and digital devices such as Alexa Echo Dot.
Trisha Baga (b.1985 in Venice, Florida, currently lives and works in New York City) is one of the most innovative artists and video-makers of her generation, combining different languages and other media, drawing from television and film imagery along with home movies. She grapples with such themes as gender identity, relations between the real and the digital world as well as technological evolution, in order to disclose a different perspective of our contemporary imagination.
“the eye, the eye and the ear”, curated by Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli, is the first institutional show of the artist in Italy. The exhibition brings together five video installations investigating the co-dependent evolution of the body with the constantly updating image technology. It covers fifteen years of production, from her first piece There’s No “I” in Trisha(2005-2007/2020), conceived as a TV sitcom that questions the gender stereotypes of all the various characters whose roles Trisha Baga plays; to the more recent work 1620 (2020)produced specifically for this show. Like a mise en abyme, the exhibition meanders through the various media which have characterized Baga's career, ranging from VHS cassettes and DVDs to 3D devices, and is deeply rooted in her performative practice. Furthermore, the artist presents a rich selection of ceramic works produced since 2015 and six pieces from the series Seed Paintings (2017), composed of sesame seeds and foam mounted on wooden panels of varying sizes.
The show’s display hints at the aesthetics commonly found in natural history museums, not only in its style of presentation, but also by using an unusual classification system that intertwines the idea of the fossil with high-tech devices such as today’s virtual personal assistants, thus creating a sort of temporal short-circuit. Through her ironical and witty perspective Baga focuses on the excessive reliance and hopes we put on technology, staging in her work its most fragile and failing aspects.
The show’s title “the eye, the eye and the ear”, individualizes and fragments the bodily senses that are active while experiencing the exhibition, in which the visual effects replicate and dialogue with the sounds in such a way that the narrative becomes a living organism.