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©2024

Pretty People
Virginia Ariu, Sveta Mordovskaya, Peter Wächtler
14.12.2024-23.02.2025

curated by Antonia Rebekka Truninger
with a text by Davide La Montagna


Images


Photos: Julian Blum / Courtesy: the artists and Windhager von Kaenel

Text


Virginia Ariu is presenting a series of collages that serve as the corner stone of her work. Ariu’s practice is an ongoing exploration of reconstruction through collecting, rewriting, stretching and rearranging objects and concepts. Snippets of adds, both image and text, come together in juxtaposition while retaining their magazine-like character. In an alternate reality, the collages are pages in magazines for the rich and beautiful which, casually placed on coffee tables, might serve as identarian attributes. Once opened, they unleash desires, the fulfillment of which remains ever more uncertain. Light penetrates the opaque walls of sleek architecture, shiny surfaces, metallic and cold, glass ceilings to reaffirm allusions to transparency. If only it wouldn’t be for those same faces creeping into our field of vision, as reflections, as ghostly reminders of their immanent powers. The bodies depicted in Ariu’s collages seem to be emptied, mere platitudes. Much like the catchy magazine headers, they embody absent presence. Or present absence.

Sveta Mordovskaya’s works “Untitled” and “Lottiiee V”, too, tie in with said tension, even though Mordovskaya alludes to the body in ways entirely different. Bodies seem to ooze from the corporeal assemblages. Even if bodies are present only in absence, one might feel their weight pressing down on us. They manifest in accumulated layeres of debris – uncanny sculptural forms emerge from assembled materials picked up in the street, online purchases (wrapping papers, foils, cleaning tools, fabrics) and artists’ materials such as ceramics and papiermâché. The fragmented forms resist order, their contours buckle under excess echoing the fetishistic pull of the body in pieces – detached, desired, yet drained of its vitality. Within the remnants of commodity production Mordovskaya excavates a set of material realities, asking how far parts of ourselves might latch on to them, making the vague objects of desire alien to themselves just as much as making the self alien to itself. Commodity fetishism seems to linger in Mordovskaya’s works where consumption doesn’t just obscure the origins of objects but fractures their coherence entirely. What is consumed turns to debris, and what is discarded returns to haunt us.

With Peter Wächtler’s 12-minute-long video work “Untitled (Vampire)” we are introduced to a creature – haunting just as much as being haunted – existing in a state of suspended alienation. A solipsistic vampire lives secluded within the dusty confines of a castle high in the mountains, outside the bounds of human society. A distant gaze on the subject vampire portrays him as he keeps on living within the mental loops of his mundane routines. All communication muted, an inescapable distance persists behind the Styrofoam walls further isolating the protagonist within an inward negation about questions of self-identification and how to fit a warming blanket with a tacky leopard-guardian into your self-representation – questions that feel existential down to their bones. All the while, the story of anyone who tries to find shelter within the small comforts of short-lasting consumptive desires seems all too familiar. If capitalism haunts us, creating inescapable conditions similar to being prey to vampires, the lonely creature in Wächtler’s work digests itself just as much as it perpetuates its existence.



Works

Sveta Mordovskaya
Untitled, 2023
Leather sofa, wire, textile, gift foil, gift paper, doll, papier-mâché, pom pom, rag, gazing ball, pillow, tights, garbage bag, ribbon, absorbent cotton, private items
225 x 200 x 90cm
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Sveta Mordovskaya
Lottiiee V, 2020
Ceramic, straw, beads, vodka bottle, shells, fake lashes, metal chain,
private items
30 × 42 × 10cm
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Virginia Ariu
Tongue’s product, 2023
Magazine crops, Polaroids, tape
33.7 x 26.4cm (unframed)
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Virginia Ariu
Reminiscences of a stock operator, 2023
Magazine crops, Polaroids, printed paper, tape
30.4 x 19.8cm (unframed)
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Virginia Ariu
Futures, 2023
Magazine crops, Polaroids, tape
29.4 x 31.5cm (unframed)
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Virginia Ariu
Not yet titled, 2023
Magazine crops, printed paper, tape
29.7 x 22.7cm (unframed)
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Peter Wächtler
Untitled (Vampire), 2019
HD video, no sound
12:09 min
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Lars Friedrich
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About the artists


Virginia Ariu (*1992, Turin) lives and works in Zurich. She studied painting at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and Visual Arts at Écal, University of Art and Design in Lausanne. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at City Galerie Wien, Vienna, at Lighthaus, with artist Vittorio Santoro, in Zürich, at Come Over Chez Malik’s, Hamburg, at Almanac Projects, Turin, at Forgo, Berlin, a solo project curated by Roger Van Voorhes in Brooklyn, New York, at Ateliers Bellevaux, Lausanne, and at No Conformism, Milan. 

Sveta Mordovskaya (*1989, Ulan-Ude) lives and works in Zurich. Sveta studied at ZHdK in Bachelor of Fine Arts and did a Diploma program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She has been presenting her work most recently at Paris Internationale (2024), Kunsthaus Biel/Bienne (2024), Kunsthalle Zurich (2023), King’s Leap, New York (2023); Weiss Falk Zurich (2022); Kevin Space, Vienna (2022); Cherish, Geneva (2020).

Peter Wächtler (1979 in Hannover, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Culturgest, Lisbon; Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin; dépendance, Brussels; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York City; The Power Station, Dallas; Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen; Foundation Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano, and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.



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