Guided by a wandering and contemplative process of observation, Vittoria Mazzonis gathers together various elements—organic and otherwise—that punctuate her path within the Botanical Garden of Turin. Over the past year, the artist has immersed herself in an in-depth exploration of the site and its history, delving into the eighteenth-century institution while engaging with readings that intertwine the vegetal world, philosophy, and science. Through this research, she has examined the ways in which contemporary humans perceive the natural ecosystem.
Multiple layers of meaning and unexpected functions have thus been assigned by the artist to the materials she has collected: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, tiles, hooks, and fragments of human-made structures designed for plants… together forming a record of the lives inhabiting this delimited patch of urban territory. These “inhabitants” or “witnesses” of the habitat itself permeate the artist’s visual imagination; she brings them into dialogue and reunites them in various areas of the Botanical Garden—among sculptural-photographic installations, floating herbaria, an interactive gazebo, and a conceptual map resting on a seedbed table.
Every element composing the four site-specific works—whether of human fabrication or vegetal origin—was found within the grounds of the garden, among its greenhouses and arboretum. In realizing this project, the artist lets instinct guide her, allowing natural contingencies to accompany her in establishing an egalitarian dialogue with the surrounding space and its native beings. Interweaving drawing, words, and classification according to need, Vittoria listens and observes, striving to deconstruct any anthropocentric perspective as much as possible, proposing alternative ways of relating to nature—and thereby awakening the viewer from that state of indifference which marks the modern individual.
The exhibition title carries a double verbal and semantic meaning, starting from the word “Radicati.” On the one hand, Radicàti (rooted) refers to the current human perception of nature—now distant, detached, no longer able to feel or understand the natural environment, to the point of having lost both grounding and identity. The vision of nature as Naturgemälde has crumbled: humanity has become an “other” organism, rather than a part of the natural ecosystem, of a single cosmos. In this sense, the exhibition proposes exercises that aim to shift our gaze in the opposite direction. Here, the second nuance of Ràdicati—as an imperative—comes into play: the artist’s invitation to re-read our relationship with nature and to open new dialogues.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/documentazione-12.jpgOn the occasion of the eightieth Anniversary of the Liberation, the Casa della Memoria in Milan presents Pulci più di prima, ora, an exhibition in which artist Valerio Eliogabalo Torrisi engages in dialogue with the resistant archives, curated by Salvatore Cristofaro.
Part of the official program of the Municipality of Milan, Time of Peace and Freedom. Eighty Years of Liberation, the exhibition offers a poetic and civic reflection on the value of memory through the language of contemporary art.
Far from any rhetorical celebration, Pulci più di prima, ora is rooted in the archival materials preserved at the Casa della Memoria — in particular those of ANED (National Association of Former Deportees in Nazi Camps) and of the Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri — to give voice to submerged stories, forgotten bodies, letters and diaries that recount lives cut short yet unyielding in their dignity.
“I feel the fleas everywhere: on our bodies, on the words they use, on the polymorphic geographies we inhabit and would like to call home. […] I see fleas everywhere, more than before, now,” writes curator Salvatore Cristofaro in the curatorial text. It is from this image — taken from an anonymous diary of an interned soldier — that the exhibition takes shape: a condition of infestation that becomes a metaphor for the present, in which “extremisms become central nuclei of power” and the principles of resistance appear increasingly obscured by “nostalgic rites, resurfaced from the pulses of time.”
All the works on display are unpublished, the result of months of study and dialogue between the artist and archival documents. Torrisi worked closely with letters of those condemned to death, testimonies of deportees, accounts of confinement and clandestine lives. “Stories of warrior sisters, broken love stories that traveled on letters sewn onto the backs of strangers,” writes Cristofaro, intertwine in an exhibition path that restores dignity to the most fragile and radical gesture: to write, even when fingers are broken, in order to leave a trace, a farewell, a promise.
“What does it really mean to be a political artist?” asks Torrisi. “To exist, to walk down the street, to carry one’s person around, to occupy a space is already political. To speak, to use words, is political. And political are the works of any artist who lives in the contemporary.” A consciousness matured over time, which grew stronger when, invited to engage with the Resistance archives, he chose to focus on the “small stories of ‘ordinary people,’ since these are the true resistance — the one made of hidden notes, hastily written words, strategies devised in the back of a church.”
Pulci più di prima, ora is not only an exhibition, but a collective gesture, a celebration of memory that entrusts art with the task of safeguarding and relaunching the values of the Resistance. As Cristofaro states: “It is an exhibition that speaks of choirs, improvised choirs in the name of freedom, of resistance, of yesterday’s struggle for today, for a free, communal and resistant world. An archival exhibition: an archive of lives that continue to struggle, writing and singing to defend that freedom which eighty years ago was so hard won.”
Pulci più di prima, ora is thus a song: fragile and political, individual and choral. A plural work that entrusts art with the task of telling History through stories — without heroism, without rhetoric. As Torrisi concludes: “No longer single stories that matter, in the journalistic sense, but many small stories that create History. Many parts that together create a great narrative.”
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/CasadellaMemoria_ValerioEliogabaloTorrisi_ph_CarlottaTornaghi8-1-scaled.jpgIn the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio’s Project Room you can find “Megalomanie” by CANEMORTO, a multifaceted project curated by Davide Pellicciari and Carlotta Spinelli.
CANEMORTO is a trio of anonymous Italian artists, active since 2007. They wear masks, speak an unknown language, and worship a canine deity called Txakurra, who grants them the power to paint as a single entity. The trio spreads the message of this mysterious cult through “six-handed” projects that span a wide range of media.
“Megalomanie” includes the Italian premiere of the film written and performed by CANEMORTO, directed by Marco Proserpio, with sound and music by Matteo Pansana, produced for the trio’s solo exhibition at the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Villa Arson in Nice. The feature-length film attempts to unveil the mystery of the Œuvre Absolue, a work capable of pleasing audiences worldwide, the secret of which, according to the trio, was known only to Pierre-Joseph Arson.
To discover it, the three artists explored the darkest corners of the Villa, desecrated tombs, and pushed alchemy to its most extreme limits.
To introduce the screening, there will be a talk with the artists, during which their special language will be consecutively translated by Giulia Gaibisso, a translator specialized in CANEMORTO’s unique idiom.
The program continues with the exhibition “Megalomanie”, which once again transforms the spaces of the Nicola Del Roscio Foundation into a true laboratory, where the artists will always have the possibility to intervene and modify the work.
“Megalomanie” tells the story of the creation of the largest etchings in the world, conceived with the goal of entering the Guinness World Records, and includes a new short film documenting the process of entering this prestigious competition.
The exhibition Haunting Spells. Fare mondi altrimenti (Worlding otherwise) originates from the work of Claudio Costa (1942–1995), an internationally significant artist whose practice was deeply rooted in anthropological inquiry, drawing from fields such as paleontology, mythology, and alchemy. His concept of work in regress functions here as a counter-temporal gesture – an excavation in reverse into the depths of myth and matter, standing in stark contrast to the ideology of linear, productive progress. Building upon Costa’s legacy – now being actively preserved and valorized through the historical archive and by C+N Gallery CANEPANERI – the project unfolds as a constellation of contemporary voices.
Alongside Costa, the works of Alessandro Di Lorenzo (1997), Peng Shuai Paolo (1995), Sofia Salazar Rosales (1999), Stefano Serretta (1987), and Ginevra Petrozzi (1997) – artists from diverse backgrounds and lineages – collectively articulate an anthropological horizon that moves beyond mere observation or representation of the “other.” These practices reactivate submerged rituals, dislocated memories, magical knowledge, and modes of contact that resist the rationalization of the world. In a time marked by a crisis of presence – a condition that has evolved from diagnosis to daily reality – these works do not seek to resolve or repair but instead inhabit the fracture. They summon spirits, evoke absences, and propose ways of worlding otherwise.
The exhibition title alludes, on one hand, to haunting: the spectral return of that which history has left unsaid or unresolved; and on the other, to spells: transformative acts capable of symbolically altering reality. Worlding Otherwise draws on the notion of the crisis of presence (Ernesto De Martino), identifying artistic practices as potential spaces for transformation in response to the symbolic, social, and political erasure of individuals and communities.
Through archival materials, site-specific installations, sculptures, and visual devices that tap into ritual practices, rural memory, queer subjectivities, and counter-hegemonic historical narratives, Haunting Spells. Fare mondi altrimenti reflects on the urgency of reclaiming art – not as an act of individual freedom, but as a vital means of engaging in the emergencies of our time. It explores how art can become a tool for worlding – the creative act of imagining and shaping possible futures.
Several works in the exhibition are being shown to the Milanese public for the first time. Among them are pieces by Alessandro Di Lorenzo, developed during a residency at CASTRO in Rome, and by Stefano Serretta, created during a residency at Tiresia in collaboration with Aldo Mieli Documentation Center, engaging with themes of corporeal politics and representation. Also on view is a new site-specific installation by Peng Shuai Paolo, and Milan debut of selected works by Ginevra Petrozzi.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/4.-Ginevra-Petrozzi-_-Congregation-of-Mysteries-Amulet-_-2024-_-CN-Gallery-CANEPANERI-scaled.jpgSlime moulds are slow-moving, curious organisms. They operate without a brain, without hierarchy, without command structures. And yet, they solve problems, make decisions, and learn from experience. A single cell of Physarum polycephalum can trace the fastest path through a maze. It doesn’t belong to any respectable kingdom—neither animal, plant, nor fungi. And yet, the slime mould knows something. It navigates, remembers, and solves. It pulses with intelligence, distributed like a whisper across its body.
In one experiment, researchers placed bits of food across a surface in the shape of the Tokyo metro map. The slime connected them using the most efficient routes. In another study, it made its way through a maze, finding the shortest path to food. Scientists have even used it to help model the large-scale structure of the universe—how matter might be spread across space.
There’s something steady and smart in the way slime moulds move. They don’t rush. They explore. They respond to their environment. They stretch out, retreat, and try again. They sense, adjust, and grow where it makes sense to grow.
The Slime Knows began with this quiet kind of intelligence. When we put out an open call, we weren’t expecting such a wide response. But what arrived felt timely—artists from across disciplines responded with a shared curiosity, as if tapping into a slimy zeitgeist, listening to the world’s softer signals, and working with forms that change, meander, or connect across space and time. The proposals showed artists already attuned to a shifting cultural terrain—working with systems that ooze, connect, absorb, and metabolize.
This show explores how artworks might listen to one another rather than compete for attention. In the wide, industrial space of Brasserie Atlas, the works appear almost hesitant at first—timid, even. But they gather, they take their time. They don’t fill the space, they settle into it. They seep, lean, ripple, and rest. Some works hang like skins or membranes. Others glow softly, or spread across the ground like roots or stains. Each piece seems to listen to the others—forming a kind of slow conversation, a quiet ecosystem, like veins of slime mould reaching out and retreating.
Materials melt, harden, seep, get sticky. Plastics slump. Foams expand and freeze mid-breath. Slime is not just wet—it’s a method. A tempo. A mode of attention that doesn’t rely on hierarchy or control. Some works lean into the vegetal, the biological, the decomposing. Others grow from petroleum derivatives, lab leftovers, or synthetic skins. What they share is a willingness to be in contact—with environments, processes, and each other.
This is not about purity. It’s about noticing what’s already there: the soft borders between nature and fabrication, decay and design. Coexistence isn’t framed as utopia. It’s messy, physical, sometimes gross. Still, things hold together. Sometimes barely. Sometimes beautifully.
The artists in The Slime Knows aren’t offering solutions or slogans. They work with what sticks, spreads, stains. Their gestures are small, porous, and often collaborative. Not to illustrate ideas, but to test out ways of being that don’t place humans in the centre of every structure.
This exhibition is a site for slow reactions. Shapes that don’t settle. Edges that blur. A kind of metabolism, collective and incomplete.
Let the slime know. Let it grow.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/the-slime-knows-64-scaled.jpgImmersed in the power of speculative fiction, Visentin constructs a landscape where reality and imagination coexist. The exhibition, designed in collaboration with Magda Antoniazzi, takes and remixes its title from the novel by Sally Rooney. It is a search, both intimate and universal, for traces of beauty in a world that often feels fractured and in flux.
At the heart of the exhibition is a yellow DIY wig sculpture incorporating a vintage TV that plays a video and a new song written by Alice Visentin, produced by Mattia “Splendore” Barro, and performed by Natacha Oberson. In the artist’s imagination, the song is written by the fictional band “Il segreto dei dolci.” The hand-painted posters with lyrics and credits represent the merchandising of an imagined “nostalgic pop” hit.
A small room divided by a paper curtain serves as an antechamber for a peephole. In a play of references, the props from the music videos (paper legs, a candle, and an ice cream cone) reappear live in a reinterpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (permanently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The artist reimagines the female figure portrayed by Duchamp, in a playful manner. She is reminiscent of a pop-style Artemide Efesia made with a paper and plasticine cut-out with multiple protruding breasts. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Visentin offers a vision of a world not lost but reimagined—one that asks: where are you, and how can we find one another again?
“What interests me most in life and in my work is the creation of new languages, in order to build new and possible paths for the future. To achieve this, I constantly
explore new techniques and I am not afraid to use nonsense, free associations between distant ideas and images, collaborative work, and the layering of different temporalities. For example, I enjoy using ancient techniques to express new ideas— and vice versa.” – Alice Visentin
Responding to TikTok trends of people mimicking artificially generated videos, Nina Davies’ new show Image Syncers explores possible futures where these generated choreographies disrupt visual economies and foster alternative modes of meaning production. Central to the show is a video narrated by a fictional podcast called What’s Sizzlin’. In this episode, host Bryce Snyder interviews journalist Teagan Carroll about her exposé on a break-in at the Trutch Seed Bank. Carroll reveals that the group, known as the Plot Corps, physically mimicked AI-generated imagery to evade detection. Their conversation expands into broader themes of ‘perception-collapse,’ ‘Image Syncing,’ and how language, images, and even bodies are evolving in a world dominated by synthetic media.
The show features unaltered images of characters from the fictional subcultures explored in the film, alongside costumes from the video, accompanied by holograms that serve as apparitions of the fictional owners of these garments.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/FUTURE_11-scaled.jpgA great burst, a prickling heat. Close eyes, imagine movement. First in the extremities and then crackling through arteries, nervous system awake and working, but jarred. One might rather be slumbering, soothed, but then would they be so aware to the changes and chances of this world’s moment? Soaring through limbs, digits twitching, head titling this way and that. Phosphenes mid-flight asterisks around retinal image, stars splitting open a passageway from this earthy position to the past, to the pious, to the patiently waiting. Those who know, who understand her pleasure and pain; those who have sat longer with this restlessness, tried to explain their internal-external shifts, have also begun titling this way and that. Know the cycling loop of relapse and recovery, on the threshold of the two. Maybe an insecurity of the soul, between salvation and perdition. Only to hear the music again, notes emerging clear and tuneful.
Moving a little more, pace upping with each footing, orbital again and again and again-st the tide of others – another might call this plagued, remembering a forgotten disease and religious offerings. She can’t forget though, a devotional obsession, a need for collectiveness – is this mania? naming it that after so many branding it so – bringing her closer to ancestors, to contemporaries even? Her body as votive / voice / vice, holding the hurt of saints and women before, holding woman as misunderstanding as miscommunication as excommunicated, through her saint-led sinfulness, through an Outsider not believing in her, not believing through her; ‘cause unknown’. Seeing difference as defiance as danger as deathliness. Remember the Dancing Plagues, Pacoria Mania, a medieval misgiving, misunderstanding as miscommunication as excommunication through saint-led shifts. Demonic possession another reckons, farfrom god in trying to come so close. A constant oscillation in circled ruins. Sketched outlines at times offering loaded colour and patterned understanding, other times fleeting light and shadowy doubt. Questioning whether the dancing plague is in fact the dancing cure. Undulations of the body, between spirit carried and spirit seeking to anchor in assured steps. She pirouettes in a blaze.
Attention on hertransposed form comes. The burst begins in small ripples, one being twisting before another twists too, and now – a searing light, a (un-)godly(?) frenzy, unsettled normalcy some might say, a closeness to deity, devotion as a flurry of marks etching the landscape across time and temptation. Between looseness and tightness, a body’s ego. To be human is to be a stranger they say. Posit Human as Strange. For some an unfamiliar fervour, for some animalistic tendencies to doggedly run, or soar, to dipping or
dropping, the gaze to her feet. A heaviness – as though all the vice and wanting has collapsed into a weight at once. Curling foetal like a cat, wrapped up in the spurring rhythms and tendency towards malady thinking am I mad? in a hazy myrrh enveloping synapses. If one edges closer they might sense it too, and question what is this feverish feeling, this aching. What does it mean for time to slow around you, for time to slow but the mind keeps quickening and other beings around you keep moving / dancing / speaking tongues at a pace faster than yours and you just want to keep up but —
To the Outsider, she might seem content and stilled, with contempt or assurance – are we, the Outsiders, in fact mad? – what does it mean, a madness, the maddening feeling to connect and understand, to grip reality like the falcon? – when really she just keeps shaking in the wind, illness / unreality / uncertainty a pummelling vortex tunnel at its peak. Like a gauzy moth scored, racing, your own blood and nervous system, the aching organs and alluvia. A moth hurtling, trying to hold its own, the body keeping the score, but everything cutting it, wings ripping, flight unfathomable now
and then. Like puppetry, she picks herself up again. Today is a good day she might announce, the Outsiders might claim, other dancing deviants might say. Today we are slowing, tomorrow we continue in our loss, of control / occupying of time and space / of orating what is happening here. Tomorrow and the next, gathering speed and stepping like ribbons, banderoles through footsteps notating the ground, the air between toes and fingers. Ribbons as inhalations-exhalations threading from one entity to the next. From sky to ground, from this moment to antiquity. From Dionysus’ Bacchae, drunk on twirling hedonism and thirst; from St John and St Vetus – historically, we place blame on others for our terrors, our truths, our sacred fracture – to our lover and friend. And eventually, as she tires from this pulsating choreography, – call it a dance, or simply, living – she looks inwards to herself. Like puppetry she lowers her raised head, slump forwards her shoulders, and concaves her chest, ribbons crumpling in on themselves, asking, what is this madness; what is this we call illness? What have we seen, what has been bared.
Banderoles as inscriptions as narrative laid naked.
Banderoles as inscriptions as narrative laid naked. Read this. Might we extend the hand/ribbon/role in this dance and ask that we hold another, and that they hold us. To hold regard for our madness and see the maddening, the madder red, the heat of our sun and deep-rooted longing. To seek the Old English and note madness as out of one’s mind, note feelings are out of one sole mind, and from the mind of another. Feeling that requires others, shaped by others; madness prescribed by those who can’t fully comprehend, prescribed by a suffering health service / suffering modernity, prescribed by another who is out of mind – we all need someone to see us – to proclaim we move in a time of extremity, stuttering at times in our dance – to move is to live, moves some can’t stop – with symptoms of a society polarised, with sickness felt sooner by some – are we, All, feeling it coming? Bodies warred against, displaced, immunity troubled, impacted upon by too much rising heat. Not one cause known.
Shivering against the system / against expectation / against one’s own body. Dance as a body’s animated pain and resistance. Pain her, transform her, offer a body to read, reparitively. What if she addressed it for its strengthening, re-constructing; her evolved lease, evolved version of her present character. Shedding, like dropped tears, the version another ascribes. Forwarding, illuminated. Her Sick And True Form negotiated anew, every time another dancer, healer, and Outsider, speaks to it, every time she speaks to it. Like dance, navigating. Self in and as flux. Her Self, verbalising, verbing, more adjectives. Embodying language, ontology. Past present future happening within. Shedding, one skin for another.
Ask this. Might we allow more quickstepping, support the uncontrollable dancing, find a way to give home to chaos, this writhing yearning, this ode to faith in something beyond. Instil hope in this performed hopelessness – *a deep sigh as you note the potential for comfort*. Might we perhaps hold, heal, hear and keep going? Come togetherin formation; accept the furore? Open up, our mind out and freewheeling. Regard faith that living is to live and leave, from Old Norse, to live on, of fire, to burn, to continue.
A great burst, a prickling heat. Another feels it, and she extends her hand – she is madder red, with loving and recognition in her blood-flow – for the next dancer, together in persistence, perhaps partnership. A quiet act of communion. In the pause between pain and reaction, she looks to the firmament, remembers the eternal round-dance.
Exhibition text by Lu Rose Cunningham
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/LARA_SMITHSON-160425_WEBRES_07.jpg123 Main St. is a consideration of the contrived nature of our own “comfort” – denaturalized from the domestic, objects that define our “homes” meld reality and
projection.
123 Main St. is a rumination on the precarious rental market of major cities: a reflection on the progressively degrading investment properties that enunciate the flimsiness of our existences for an ever-increasing cost.
123 Main St. is a reflection on the coldness of mass-produced design, reflecting and satirizing the sameness of our most intimate spaces.
123 Main St. is a meditation on the time Hunczak was harassed by a landlord for over two years, and then, when on his way to the hospital to treat a panic attack the night before a court date, got t-boned in his car.
123 Main St. is a testament to how much weird stuff airport security will let you put on a plane so long as you tell them it’s for “art.”
123 Main St. is an art show.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/300325_HIRES_39.jpgSamuel Fasse
UNFOLDING
A text scrolls across an LED screen, fragment by fragment. It is never fully graspable, always in the pro-cess of slipping away. It falls to the viewer to reassemble it, to attribute meaning. This is how SamuelFasse’s exhibition operates: time here doesn’t follow a linear trajectory — it folds and unfolds in loops.What we encounter belongs to a continuum, a chapter in a story still in formation. The large centralobject is both whole and fragment, a self-contained installation and a vestige of a film that does notyet exist — but will. It suggests a reality in recomposition, a liminal space where the mechanical, thehuman, and the organic coexist.Before us stands a hybrid object. Its totemic dimension — conferred by its scale and pyramidal compo-sition — evokes a collective ritual. This is central to Fasse’s practice, in which the fragmentation of thereal calls for the creation of moments of communion to make sense of it. Like mythology, this objectis layered with meaning, inviting a slow unraveling.The body is foregrounded — both individual and social — at once referenced and tested. The transpar-ent fabric evokes skin, a porous membrane onto which desire and constraint are projected. The urbanbollard concealed beneath imposes a rigid verticality, evoking both a territorial marker and an erectphallus.. It compresses tensions between body and environment, between oppression and resistance.The tautness of the fabric, its way of hugging the structure while hiding something within, speaks tothe dynamics of revelation and concealment.This double dynamic of looking also touches on staging, underlined by the wooden structure in-spired by cycloramas. Essential in the fashion industry — where Fasse works as a scenographer— these devices create void-like spaces where bodies can be exposed and shaped. The sameis true of the city — especially Paris, which Fasse evokes directly through the salvaged streetbollard: an open-air theatre where bodies are continuously on display, governed by permanentspectacle.This theatricality is key — it introduces a fictional regime. Fasse appropriates it in order to twist it,sketching out a new mythology of bodies and identities — urban, technological.At heart, the work asks how technology shapes our bodies and our selves. The constant scroll of text onthe LED screen suggests identities in flux, sculpted by a relentless stream of images and informationmediated by machines. The light from the screen, filtering through the fabric membrane, expresseshow technological subjectivity becomes internalized — a kind of new cyborg reality.Finally, the environment of Cabanon is not mere scenography: it plays an active role in reconfiguringthe fragmented narrative Fasse constructs. The plants outside introduce a living counterpoint — apossible re-acclimatization in the face of collapse. The exhibition space becomes a capsule; the worldbeyond it, a space of projection.Camille Bréchignac
Cabanon is a central Parisian pop-up exhibition initiativerun by Anaïs Horn & Eilert Asmervik, est. in 2023.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/untitled1-scaled.jpg
The Door
By Miroslav Holub
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.
To celebrate the first anniversary of the gallery, Palmer Gallery will be launching The Door, a new pro-
gramme hosted in the annexed space at the back of the gallery. Functioning as a pseudo-project space,
The Door is dedicated to supporting artists who work in less commercially-driven practices, offering
them a platform to create immersive, experimental, and conceptual environments. This new initiative will feature a series of solo exhibitions running alongside the main gallery programme but with a sharper focus on experimentation, worldbuilding, and sensory engagement. The programme launches on March 6th with a solo presentation by Daria Blum.
Each presentation will showcase artists whose practices emphasize multi-sensory installations, site-specific work, and the transformation of space into immersive and thought-provoking environments. The name The Door is drawn from a poem by the Czech modernist Miroslav Holub (see above). The poem is about stimulating intellectual curiosity through endeavour, while feeling and responding to reality through an appreciation of the present. It encourages readers to embrace change and uncertainty by stepping into the unknown, suggesting that even the act of opening a door can lead to discovery, renewal, and possibility. The name also highlights the physical partition between the main gallery and The Door space, serving as a gateway into the artist’s world – a portal that can be shaped and reimagined with each new presentation.
The Door’s first presentation will be by Daria Blum, a performance artist and Royal Academy Schools alumna. The work presented at Palmer Gallery is based on Blum’s reflections on the role of the live performer, and her own attempts at deflecting and withdrawing from the audience’s gaze and attention. Blum’s presentation at The Door stages an intriguing interplay of objects, text and lighting, which makes use of reflective surfaces to implicate the viewer and explore how an installation can embody or stand in for semi-fictional personas.
The presentation forms part of a wider body of work that includes Blum’s thought processes around female friendship. Within her text-based work, Blum moves through aspirations, half-truths and fiction, often using a first-person perspective to narrate semi-autobiographical relationships, encounters, and disputes between various female characters and alter egos. Parts of this written text were included in her recent installation ‘Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot’ at Claridge’s ArtSpace, in which chronic cranial pain was personified as both an intrusive female presence and a compulsive liar. Blum’s work at The Door delves further into themes of dishonesty, deflection, and fiction within performance, sculpture, and storytelling.
https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Daria-Palmer-8-scaled.jpghttps://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/DB_190225-044-scaled.jpg