Review: ‘To hold and be held’ by Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 20th April – 15th May 2010

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Untitled (touch wood) multiples (installation view)
2009
Burnt wood, resin
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

A beautiful exhibition of objects by Swiss/Italian artist Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, one full of delicate resonances and remembrances.

Obelisk pendants in blackened and silvered wood, Neolithic standing stones, totemic, silent;
The hole through the object akin to ‘seeing’ through time.
Exposed wood on base (touch wood) as grounding.

The standing stone installation an altar piece, a dark reliquary (see image above)

Glass vessels with internal funnels filled with the gold detritus of disassembled objects, found pendants:
Horse, Anchor, Four leaf clover, Swan, Hammer & sickle (see images below)

The distance between the bail – the finding that attaches the pendant to the necklace – and the remainder/reminder of the vessel itself. What a distance!

As Sally Mann would articulate, ‘What remains’1 …

Lives previous to this incarnation; jewels embedded in dust.
The captured potency of displaced objects.
Personal and yet anonymous at one and the same time.

Brooches of gloss and matt black resin plates. A plastic black, almost Rembrandt-esque.

On the reverse images exposed like a photographic plate, found images solidified in resin.

The front: the depths of the universe, navigating the dazzling darkness
The back: memories, forgotten, then remade, worn like a secret against the beating chest. Only the wearer knows!

Here is a territorialization, “a double movement, where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings.”2

As Kiki Gianocca asks, “I am not sure if I grasp the memories that sometimes come to mind.
I start to think they hold me instead of me holding them.”

 
Time is the distance between objects. No objects.
Space is the distance between events. No events.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ “Mann’s fifth book, What Remains, published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC and is in five parts. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound, after decomposition. The second part has the photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal Forensic Anthropology Facility (known as the ‘body farm’). The third part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed. The fourth part is a study of the grounds of Antietam (the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War. The last part is a study of close-ups of the faces of her children. Thus, this study of mortality, decay and death ends with hope and love.”
Sally Mann. Wikipedia [Online] Cited 02/05/2010

2/ “For them (Deleuze and Guattari), assemblages are the processes by which various configurations of linked components function in an intersection with each other, a process that can be both productive and disruptive. Any such process involves a territorialization; there is a double movement where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings. The organization of a territory is characterized by such a double movement … An assemblage is an extension of this process, and can be thought of as constituted by an intensification of these processes around a particular site through a multiplicity of intersections of such territorializations.”
Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance ” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, p. 166.

Many thankx to Katie and Gallery Funaki for allowing me to take the photographs in the gallery and post them online. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Marcus Bunyan except The waterfall.

 

 

“I own a stone that a friend passed to me, and a shackle that Michael gave me.

I found a curious object in Lisbon at the fleamarket, I paid one euro for it and I still don’t know what it is.

Yesterday I had a look again at the picture you shot. I am not sure if I grasp the memories that sometimes come to mind.

I start to think they hold me instead of me holding them.”

Kiko Gianocca, April 2010

 

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Untitled (touch wood) multiples (installation views)
2009
Wood, silver
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Horse, Anchor, Four leaf clover and Swan (left to right) (installation view)
2009
18k gold, glass
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Horse (installation view)
2009
18k gold, glass
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Anchor (installation view)
2009
18k gold, glass
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Swan (installation view)
2009
18k gold, glass
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Installation view of exhibition with Untitled (touch wood) burnt wood multiples in distance
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
Man & dog (installation view)
2009
Found image, resin, silver
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
The waterfall
2009
Found image, resin, silver

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
The dog (installation view)
2009
Found image, resin, silver
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
The kiss (reverse) (installation view)
2009
Found image, resin, silver
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
The way up (reverse) (installation view)
2009
Found image, resin, silver
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974)
The beast (reverse) (installation view)
2009
Found image, resin, silver
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

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Sackville House
Apartment 33
27 Flinders Lane
Melbourne 3000
Australia

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Saturday on occasion (check our socials) or by appointment

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