Exhibitions
11 Apr 12 May 2019
Supplica per un’appendice
Ketty La Rocca, Jeewi Lee, Anna Möller, Lerato Shadi, Eske Schlüters
VILLA ROMANA at Kunstraum München
We cordially invite you and your friends to the opening of the exhibition on
Wednesday, 10 April at 7 pm.
Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 14 – 19
Eske Schlüters, Per quanto mi riguarda, 2012, video, diapositive, audio, 8 min
exhibition view, in the front: Jeewi Lee: Verdauung (worktitle), 2018, text-collage on wafer paper, food colouring
Ketty La Rocca, Virgola con tre punti, 1970, cut and painted PVC*
Ketty La Rocca, Appendice per una supplica, 1972, video, mute, 9.30 min*
Ketty La Rocca, Moshe Dayan, 1974, photograph and ink on paper*
Jeewi Lee, Narcissus, 2013, hemispheres on mirror foil in braille
Ketty La Rocca, Viale Filippo Strozzi, 1974, photograph and ink on paper*
Jeewi Lee, Spannungsfeld, 2018, paper, scooped from notebooks, embossing pressure
Ketty La Rocca, Dal momento in cui, 1971, typewriter and handwriting on paper*
Anna Möller, Ohne Titel (for Ketty), 2012, inkjet prints, three-piece
Lerato Shadi, Lefa Le, 2019, installation with two neonelements
photos: Thomas Splett
*courtesy The Ketty La Rocca Estate
In 1972 the artist Ketty La Rocca exhibited the silent black-and-white video film Appendice per una supplica (Supplement for a Petition) at the Venice Biennale: it shows hands making simple gestures, outstretched, fingers intertwined, clenched in fists, enclosed in other hands, counting the fingers.
40 years later, the artists’ house Villa Romana in Florence dedicated the exhibition Supplica per un’appendice to Ketty La Rocca and exhibited her works together with those of a number of young contemporary artists. Ketty La Rocca, who died in Florence in 1976, remains an artists’ artist to this day. Her oeuvre, which came together in the brief period between 1964 and 1976, was largely ignored after her death. It comprises collage, sculpture, photography, video film, performance, drawing and text, and it constantly revolves around the difference between sign and body, appropriation and transference, power and resistance in the desire for a different, another language that can give the non-identical form and shape.
In the exhibition space Kunstraum München her works are now presented against an updated context: four Villa Romana prize winners from the years 2012 and 2018 have created works inspired by Ketty La Rocca. Taking different perspectives, they address core elements of artistic productivity: the space between representation and communication, language and body, identity and deviation.
In her artistic projects, Anna Möller (1980) works with strategies of the withdrawal of visibility, using physical gestures and dissimulations. Eske Schlüters (1970) weaves together voids in film narration in order to evoke the difference between pictures as an unclaimed zone. Jeewi Lee (1987) engages with the materiality of traces and their inherent tension between presence and absence. Lerato Shadi's works (1979) are concerned with those who leave no traces, with extinguished ways of life, with Black Feminism.
The exhibition is accompanied by two publications on Ketty La Rocca: The book Supplica per un’ Appendice, initiated and designed by Anna Möller, includes texts by Ketty La Rocca (in various German translations), as well as contributions by the philosopher and film-maker Eva Meyer and by the artist Josef Strau. The first English-language monograph Ketty La Rocca, You - works and writings 1964 – 1976, edited by Angelika Stepken in 2018, documents the artist’s complete artistic oeuvre, and includes numerous texts by Ketty La Rocca as well as contributions by Emi Fontana, Pier Luigi Tazzi and Angelika Stepken.
A project by Angelika Stepken in cooperation with Emily Barsi.
We are grateful to The Ketty La Rocca Estate for their generous cooperation.
with the generous support of
