April 2015 – Emilia Faro, ‘The Healing’

Emilia Faro, ‘The Healing’.
Video, installations and artworks on paper, curated by Olga Gambari
Opening: 30th March 2015 at 18.30h
Exhibition: 31st March – 3rd May
By appointment

Videoinsight® Foundation®, Monday 30th March 2015, 18.30h, at Videoinsight® Center Turin, inaugurates the personal exhibition, The Healing, dedicated to artist EMILIA FARO. The exhibition and new catalogue, The Healing, 2015 is curated by Olga Gambari.
The exhibition describes Emilia Faro’s artistic path from 2010 to today, starting from the moment when video, a language naturally necessary for the evolution and development of her narration and imagination, exploded into the artistic dimension that Faro was most familiar with, watercolour. It’s a medium that is constantly shifting and indeed liquid, dynamic, undefined and shimmering. When Emilia started making videos she actually started writing a “diary” and partly a memoir too, pitched between real and imaginary, which focuses on the artist’s own identity. Emilia Faro has made seven videos since 2010. With The prince’s metamorphosis (2010, featuring a little girl, animated by her own watercolour portrait, sitting in the rain, while a crowded circle of frogs appear around her) the artist embarks on a study of the identity of woman, in the sense of her growth and evolution from infancy to adulthood, a work in progress that will last a lifetime and which has formed a trilogy up until now. The trilogy also includes If I was to escape from you (2013, where we find a girl, sitting on the floor writing a painful letter to her father, dipping her plaited hair into a basin of water), and The Healing (2015, in which the protagonist, now a young woman, is at the centre of a healing performed with light, which bathes the body and spirit). In A Palm of Victory I shall wear (2013) the image consists of a woman’s naked body with the projected image of a palm superimposed over it, which bonds the physical strength and resistance of a plant with that of a human, in a symbolic icon that speaks of life and death. A chorus of female figures sits at the centre of Safe in deep water (2014). It’s a kind of underwater snow globe containing a family: an aquarium, from which the world appears a separate entity, with all its difficulty. Emilia Faro appears for the first time in this video, while she is instead the absolute protagonist in the video The path leading to love from heights above (2014). It’s an evolutional path that unfolds in stages, in the form of an Ascension Day parade, which sees the maturing and liberation of a woman. A figure dressed in black walks through a wood with a large pumice stone tied to her ankle, reaching an abandoned building. Here, with a hammer and chisel, the stone is transformed into a group of black spheres, a spiral mandala, elaboration of shapeless material into something harmonious. In My Armour (2015), a performance video, which shows a suit of armour, a body and a soul which both defend and at the same time attack each other. A young woman captures the shock of the world, proud and serene in the face of the blows that rain down on her, until she decided to free herself of the suit of armour. It is a cathartic act, of overcoming and denying her rage, but also a symbol of the artist who, like a warrior, faces life by wearing a suit of armour, as if she were going off to war, to conquer. They are stories in the form of videos, combining magical realism, surrealism and symbolism, in which arcane, ambiguous tones predominate. Nothing reassures, not even beauty.