Data / Ora
Date(s) - 09/11/2024 - 12/01/2025
4:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Luogo
THEPÒSITO Art Space

Categorie

• TUTTI GLI EVENTI

Even When I’m Not Here is Chiara Ventura’s solo show for THEPÒSITO Art Space, the opening of the exhibition is part of the program of the 2024 edition of the event “RIGENERARSI” promoted by the Municipality of Narni. The artist’s work explores the complex themes of interpersonal relationships, language and emotional expression, with a particular focus on contradictory exchange mechanisms between individuals. The exhibition invites us to reflect on what happens when communication is made difficult or impossible, when words fail or are censored and when reciprocity between bodies becomes a physical game of empties and fullness.
‘What I try to tell you’ (2023), a digitally processed image printed on glossy paper represents a reflection on language and expression. The work appears inside a vacuum-sealed envelope that creates a physical and symbolic distance between the image and the viewer, the distance that exists between what one would say and what one can actually express, between the present self and the perceived self by others. Inside, a portion of water flowing is rendered unrecognizable by an editing process that alters its original shape. Water, symbol of flow and exchange, is locked and compressed in a breathless space, the image becomes a metaphor for a filtered communication that tries to express something but remaining incomplete, altered, and perhaps inaccessible. Chiara Ventura explores the paradox of language. While feelings and emotions are deep and spontaneous, the word is fragile, ambiguous, subject to misunderstandings. In the title of the work, the verb “to try” suggests both an attempt to express oneself and a pure emotional experience, unfiltered by words. The result is an image that communicates the impossibility of saying, leaving room for silence and sensory perception of the body.
In dialogue with this reflection is the performance ‘A mare’ (2023), projected on a screen. Here, the body and the sea become metaphors of intimacy and exchange between individuals. Ventura describes the movement of waves as a sculpture made by two bodies, after love, where the sea represents the flow of shared and mutually absorbed emotions. The performance reveals the transparency of intimate relationships, in which bodies fill and empty each other, revealing a dynamic of giving and receiving, intimacy and distance.
In ‘A mare te’ (2023) the clothes worn during the performance become a work its own. These clothes, imbued with shared memories and gestures, symbolically embody the memory of the body and contact, emphasizing the link between matter and emotion. ‘A mare te’ extends the theme of the relationship to the world of objects, transforming clothes into silent witnesses of the encounter between bodies, where every fold and trace leaves a mark of what has been lived.
The work that gives the exhibition its title is ‘Even when I’m not here’ (2024), a photograph that immortalizes the artist’s companion on the bed at the end of sexual intercourse, placed inside a blue bag. In the photo, the blankets, are absurdly forming a wave (for shape and color), becoming symbol of an inner sea and a shared flow. The photo is placed in a water bag, a container that normally houses vital liquids, such as water, but which in this case has been emptied. In the absence, the visual ‘sea’ of the photo takes over, evoking a contrast between the lack of a real flow and the symbolic presence of an emotional wave. On the bag are written the words EVEN WHEN I’M NOT HERE, a message that recalls the feeling of presence despite the physical absence. This work is the result of a moment from the performance ‘Apnea’, presented for the first time at Villa Rondinelli (Fiesole) in November 2023. During the action the artist uses the drinking bag, in a gesture suspended between caring herself – the bag evokes a vial – and autoerotism, because it is carried between the performer’s legs, while she looks at her partner’s photo. The gesture becomes a metaphor for the way in which relationships are nourished by a delicate balance between vulnerability and power, between distance and proximity. During the performance the sentence would be concluded by the words TRUST ME, written on another bag instead full; for the exhibition, the work does not present itself as double, and the narration is therefore left incomplete, reduced to one element that mentions ‘even when I am not here’. This choice invites the viewer to reflect and complete the sentence in a personal way, emphasizing the idea that trust is a preconceived condition in relationships. The act of trusting becomes a powerful subtext, an unsaid that connects individuals even in absence, and that puts emotional communication beyond explicit words and gestures.
Even When I’m Not Here is therefore an artistic research that questions the boundary between absence and presence, between what is said and the unspoken, offering a perspective on how new generations are confronted with the inability and the difficulty of telling and sharing themselves everything. It presents a complex and stratified reflection on the dynamics of human bonds, highlighting how communication, instead of facilitating the encounter between people, can often become an obstacle. The exhibition becomes an analysis of how the last generations live and interpret relationships in an age where media overabundance does not correspond to greater clarity or depth of exchange. In a hyper-connected world, where digital language accelerates and fragments human contact, words risk becoming slippery surfaces, distant from the emotional truth they intend to express. Ventura is confronted with the difficulty of finding a balance between saying and not saying, between intention and message reception, in a generation that often experiences the tension between the need to connect and the fear of being misunderstood or misinterpreted. In her works, the awareness emerges that authentic expression, whether verbal, bodily or visual, is subject to barriers, misunderstandings and silences. Interpersonal relationships thus become an uncertain space, where language itself, instead of being a tool for clarity, can turn into an ambiguous weapon, a mask behind which to hide deeper emotions.

Chiara Ventura (Verona, 1997) is a visual artist and performer. Her work is genuinely existential, where biography becomes a feature. Her paintings, always on the edge between figuration and abstraction, embody the macro-themes present in her sculptural, conceptual, and performative works. The analysis of the body, and the relationships and reactions it has with the psyche, emotionality, and the Other, has been the starting point for the development of a practice, predominantly performative, in which the uncomfortable and unprotected point, for the doer and the viewer, is the focus of attention. Ventura investigates denounces the most devious aspects of contemporary forms of violence and is interested in the political aspects of human behaviour. In 2020, she co-founded plurale, a concept that takes shape in collective art-making, a dynamic where the individual artist merges into a common perspective, a Zen practice of ego decentering. In 2022, it published Empathic gesture (Manifesto) and has activated a transfeminist practice, observing sexuality and pleasure as political spaces. Furthermore, plurale is interested in youth culture, particularly studying the phenomenon of Italian trap music, analyzing the sociocultural issues related to new generations. Chiara Ventura has performed and exhibited at museums, foundations, galleries, and independent spaces, including Mart – Galleria Civica di Trento (Trento), Tenuta Dello Scompiglio (Lucca), Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venice), Viafarini (Milan), Villa Rondinelli (Fiesole), Galleria ME Vannucci (Pistoia), TAI – Tuscan Art Industry (Prato), GATE26A (Modena), Spazio In Situ (Rome), Spazio Cordis (Verona).