An artist who builds ‘momentary monuments’

‘Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out’, an overview of the Italian artist’s work, was first hosted at MoMA PS1. For it she created a new site-specific installation extending throughout the galley spaces. The artist created another original artwork for an exclusive Sharjah presentation at Bait Al Serkal, Arts Area.

It comprised several works from the past decade and a half, as well as many new ones created specifically for the exhibition series. The shows also featured the first presentation of the extensive archive of images collected by Favaretto as source material and artistic inspiration. Here’s a quick snapshot of the showcase curated by Peter Eleey:

• In both her installations and individual works, she repeatedly reminds us of the choices we make, and of those that are made for us. Balanced between aspiration and failure, she enacts a conflicted kind of freedom, an illusion of autonomy and control where finally neither may exist. A sense of resignation to the forces of decay and obsolescence runs throughout her work—most visibly in her minimal cubes made of confetti, which decompose during the period of their display.
• Favaretto represents the eventuality of loss through a recuperative memorialization, often recycling elements from previous installations as new works, reusing discarded industrial materials, and encasing found paintings in loose tapestries of wool yarn.
• Beginning with a swamp that she created at the back of the Giardini in Venice to commemorate twenty historical figures who have disappeared, and continuing with her sandbagging of a 1896 statue of Dante Alighieri in a civic square in Trento, her sculptures and public installations draw attention to the futility and impermanence of memorials themselves.
• Favaretto memorializes the body in a similar state of limbo, often through mechanical representations that gradually degrade: car wash brushes whirl repeatedly, wearing themselves down against metal plates; a platoon of compressed air cylinders randomly empties itself, blowing silent party favors. These animist machines celebrate their own absurdity, taking on lives of their own, while also reflecting ours.

In essence, much of her work subtly alludes to the modern life’s casualties, referring to the body as well as the natural environ through industrial and mechanical forms that often change and degrade.