CURA.

Monica Bonvicini, Bonded Eternmale, 2002

A private lounge waiting for its guest. Two 1960s Willy Guhl chairs and a table made in Eternit are reinterpreted by Bonvicini, re-covered in studded black leather and set on a vivid red carpet. The installation revisits the themes of her 2000 publication EternMale, in which she re-read Playboy’s late-sixties guides to the ideal bachelor pad and the domestication of masculinity. Here, domestic comfort hardens into display. The room’s smooth curves close in on themselves, transforming intimacy into a scene of possession and unease.

Sara Enrico, The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022

A concrete jumpsuit stands upright, its folds frozen mid-motion. Once a soft garment, now hardened into a shell of endurance, it bears the weight of an absent body. The rough surface retains traces of pigment. What was meant for movement has become a monument. The suit carries the burden of those who no longer wear it. In its stillness, motion endures as echo.

Christian Boltanski, Children, 2011

Rows of children’s faces glow under small bulbs, their gazes suspended between presence and disappearance. Enlarged and faded, the portraits recall newspaper obituaries. Boltanski’s installation, part of his long meditation on remembrance, turns the space into a silent chapel. Childhood here becomes a collective monument to what remains when stories fade.

Tracey Emin, Dolly, 2002

Emin transforms intimacy into a visual script, using drawing as touch through the body’s own handwriting. Dolly suggests both childhood innocence and the objectification of the female body, which is a recurring duality in Emin’s work. The stitched figure evokes the intimacy of self-portraiture, yet also the distance of a surrogate body. Emin has often described embroidery as an act of mending, the needle becoming a tool for reclaiming one’s own wounds. The inclusion of a small flower, echoing the exposed contours of an anus, suggests vulnerability rendered as offering and gestures toward shame turned into tenderness.

The bread is a vector of nourishment and belonging. Created in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the work transforms domestic matter into a reflection on displacement. Shaped from stone yet offered like food, it is a humble act of exchange between those who give and those who endure. Territory becomes the fragile sharing of sustenance amid fracture.

Bracha L. Ettinger, Ophelia–Medusa No. 2, 2006–2013

Ettinger intertwines two mythological figures to explore the threshold between strength and vulnerability. Ophelia’s surrender meets Medusa’s petrifying gaze in an intense encounter where tenderness and danger converge, and the fragility of a fatal moment becomes tangible.

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Lerato le le golo (…la go hloka bo kantle), 2022

Branches tied with blue ribbon, neon light, stones, clay bowls, and small casts of animals form a landscape of offerings. Herbs and ritual fragments assemble into a choreography of matter recalling ancestral ceremony. Bopape’s installation gathers energies of remembrance, composing a space where the spiritual and the material meet in resonance.

Sophie Calle, Voir la mer. Femme qui rit, 2011

In Istanbul, Calle films those seeing the sea for the first time. Each encounter unfolds in silence. Faces turned toward the horizon, then back to the camera, carrying the reflection of what they have just seen. The artist turns the act of looking into a gift, in a passage from intimacy to exposure. Hospitality here is the space she opens for others to be seen and to return the gaze.

Chiara Camoni, Serpentessa, 2020

Half-woman, half-serpent, Serpentessa fuses myth and matter. Camoni’s creature embodies fantasy as metamorphosis, where dream and nature intertwine. Imagination becomes a gesture of collective repair, blurring the line between the real and the possible.

Nira Pereg, Abraham Abraham, 2012

Filmed in the divided sanctuary of Hebron, Abraham Abraham unfolds across two screens, tracing an impossible symmetry between faiths. Pilgrims move through mirrored thresholds where rituals overlap yet never meet. Pereg captures these brief pauses within a landscape dense with history and control. The journey becomes a choreography of passage and denial. Between repetition and rupture, the act of crossing turns into the work itself.

Dorothy Iannone, Hommage aux femmes et aux hommes, 1983

Bodies entwine in radiant symmetry, surrounded by hand-painted words of desire. Iannone’s figures speak of union as freedom. It is an ecstatic language where intimacy and devotion dissolve every hierarchy.

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1969

Charred fragments of coal and iron rest atop a steel table, a silent theatre of weight. Kounellis stages loss as material fact, where what remains is not mourning but persistence. It is the stubborn endurance of matter once shaped by human hands. The work breathes through subtraction with its blackened surface holding the echo of vanished warmth.

Marisa Merz, Untitled, 1997

A white violin floats in a basin of lead filled with water. A hidden motor sets the current in motion, drawing a downward curve shaped like a heart. The instrument does not melt. Its music is the murmur of flow and gravity. Made of paraffin and copper wire, the work gathers matter and energy in fragile balance. Merz builds a monument to transience, where sound replaces stone and tenderness endures beyond form.

Carla Accardi, Labirinto No. 12, 1958

In her abstract labyrinth of signs, Accardi constructs an open mental refuge. Labirinto No. 12 is an intricate network of pictorial pathways floating on a luminous ground. Each enamel trace suggests secret chambers for retreat.

Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016

Robotic arms rehearse dance movements to a pounding electronic beat. Veering between rhythm and collapse, the screen becomes a collective stage where humans and machines perform exhaustion together. Humour merges with dystopia while repetition turns to trance. Hell Yeah We Fuck Die opens a field of shared catharsis.

Susan Philipsz, The Internationale, 1999

Philipsz makes the socialist song The Internationale resonate through the space, singing it a cappella. Marked by pauses and subtle cracks, her interpretation makes the physical presence of the voice perceptible, creating a moment of collective sharing in which the audience is invited to recognise themselves in a song of solidarity.

Chantal Joffe, Hanya Yanagihara, 2021

In Joffe’s work, the portrayed face radiates an ineffable calm. The portrait of Hanya Yanagihara is defined by delicate gestures and soft hues, transforming time into a suspended breath. The absence of distractions around the figure reveals an intense inner silence. Hanya Yanagihara is a moment of pure stillness withdrawn from the flow of daily life.

Rebeca Romero, Semilla SAGRADA, 2023

Romero imagines a civilization that honors a magical plant-being both animate and divine. Drawing from Amerindian cosmogonies and post-human perspectives, the work dissolves fixed boundaries and opens a space where every form holds spirit. Through AI-generated storytelling and 3D animation, Romero shapes a vision that grows from ancestral belief and moves toward speculative futures. This is a root that anchors the imagination in sacred matter, offering a way to reconnect with what has been erased or forgotten.

Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 2008

A wooden chair stands intact, yet altered. Its familiar shape persists, but something has shifted. Voids have been carved out and its material seems to fold into itself. Salcedo turns furniture into a silent witness, as a body shaped by a violence that never speaks aloud. Drawn from testimonies of those marked by disappearance, Untitled bears the weight of unresolved grief. The chair becomes the trace of a life removed. What was once a place of rest now absorbs absence. Suspension emerges as a state in which memory clings to matter. In this stillness, her work allows pain to surface and be seen.

Emily Jacir, ENTRY DENIED (A Concert in Jerusalem), 2003

Jacir captures the silence of a crossing denied. The film documents a concert that never took place in Jerusalem. The impossibility of passage becomes a suspended threshold in time, a place of waiting resonating with the echo of muted notes. The work embodies the tension before every attempt to cross a border and the void of an inaccessible space.

Allora & Calzadilla, Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, 2008

The Beethovenian myth of universal harmony is reinterpreted by Allora & Calzadilla by placing a musician inside a piano, transforming the Ode to Joy into a sequence of percussive pulsations. The utopia of brotherhood takes on a dissonant tone. Poetic passages are fractured by metallic resonance, exposing the rift between collective ideals and fragmented reality.

Cécile B. Evans, Handy if You’re Learning to Fly I–II, 2016

Evans explores the fragility of learning at the threshold of visibility. In these video installations, spectral figures attempt to take flight with naïve determination. Each hesitant motion reveals their vulnerability, where soaring aspirations meet palpable fear.

Chiara Pirito, Within image, 2003

Pirito acts as a discreet witness to urban life. In Within image, she records the indistinct flow of gazes and gestures, capturing the fleeting postures of people absorbed in the rhythm of everyday life. Each face is caught in a moment of rapture, and the work preserves that fragile instant of encounter with the other, suspending it in time through the stillness of the camera.

Carol Rama, Nonna Carolina, 1936

The tender presence of a grandmother contrasts with the harshness of private pain. In Nonna Carolina, Rama channels childhood anxieties, yet the old woman’s smile becomes a symbol of care. The artist intertwines the sweetness of memory with the roughness of experience, suggesting that even in the most alien space, namely the mental asylum of remembrance, there is room for affectionate welcome.

Alighiero Boetti, Tutto, 1987-1988

A dense field of embroidered fragments unfolds without rest. Tutto gathers the world to prevent it from dissolving. Every figure stays close, insisting on its presence. Boetti’s process was collaborative. The drawings were assembled in Rome and then entrusted to Afghan craftswomen in the refugee camps of Peshawar. The women chose the colors freely, generating unexpected harmonies beyond the artist’s direction. In this shared rhythm, Tutto became a dispersed act of care. It expresses a yearning to remember without choosing. A desire to hold what matters before it slips beyond reach.

Mona Hatoum, Undercurrent, 2008

Hatoum’s voice reverberates beneath the surface of a secret territory. Undercurrent evokes latent fears and invisible borders. The violence of limits emerges through pulsating sounds. The exiled Palestinian artist builds an emotional map of painful memories, where every bodily and spatial boundary becomes a fragile threshold to be crossed with both fear and hope.