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EVENT DESCRIPTION
Rossi & Rossi is pleased to present In my holding, the first solo exhibition in Asia of Bahamian artist Janine Antoni (b. 1964). Known for her groundbreaking performance works, she uses her body as a conduit, a tool and an anchor for meaning. Antoni’s early methods involved transforming unique materials such as chocolate and soap through habitual, everyday processes like bathing, eating and sleeping to create sculptural works that called attention to the meaning of the making. Antoni carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality is meant to speak directly to the viewer’s body. The work on view continues to investigate the expressive capacity of the body as well as what it means to live from an embodied place. The exhibition runs from 25 May to 20 July 2024.
From the Vow Made (2015) is a series of ghostly sculptures where the interior and exterior of the body meet in impossible connections. Through these marriages, psychological space turns physical. The translucent objects are created with a purposeful erasure of detail, a memory half remembered. The works reference milagros, replicas of body parts made as prayers or votive offerings for healing. to return (2015) is a domestic stool with a cupped hand embracing a tailbone in the place where a body would sit. As the sacrum is the site of our evolutionary lost tail, the hand cradles the remains of this ancient sever. One rung of the stool is replaced with the branch of a tree. In this sculpture, all parts turn and return. The tip of the coccyx sinks into the seat of the stool. The body and stool graft to one another taking their relationship to an extreme. The stool has been designed for the body, but over time, the stool has designed the body.
In the series Gilded Gestures (2019), Antoni renders the earthly body sacred in photographs of gestures painted gold and framed with casts of the bones of the body parts depicted. The artist turns to religious icons, calling on their techniques and convictions to frame these gestures. By replacing traditional deities or saints with bodily gestures, she honours the body’s fragility and conductive capacity. Antoni and her family enact gestures of intimate connection inspired by a range of religious iconography, from the Virgin Mary’s hand to the Buddha’s foot. In I touch your listening (2019), Antoni’s mother’s hand touches her father’s ear in an atmosphere of gold. Casts of the three small bones of the ear spiral to form the gold frame, honouring the formation of sound as it enters the body. Below, a dragged single finger bone cradles the gesture. Listening and touching thus collapse into each other. Antoni noticed that over time, as her elderly parents lost access to language and memory, touch replaced other forms of communication. The image therefore captures love in the face of impending death and asks: How does love outlive life?
Antoni painstakingly calibrates each gesture and deliberates over each symbol. In doing so, she constructs a world in which one’s memories are revived through contact with her work. Each one carries a visceral physicality of its own that serves as a catalyst to connect with the viewer’s body and senses.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a titular catalogue with an essay by Eugenie Tsai, former curator of contemporary art at Brooklyn Museum, and an interview with the artist by Elaine W. Ng, editor and publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.
ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER
vJanine Antoni was born in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and she earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Antoni has exhibited internationally at major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Magasin III, Stockholm; the Hayward Gallery, London; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich.
She has also been represented in international biennials and festivals, such as the Whitney Biennial, New York; the Venice Biennale; the Johannesburg Biennale; the Gwangju Biennale; the Istanbul Biennial; SITE Santa Fe; Project 1 Biennial, New Orleans; the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and documenta 14 at the Fridericianum, Kassel.
The artist’s work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Magasin III, Stockholm; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a 2012 Creative Capital Artist Grant and the 2014 Anonymous Was A Woman award.
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