Esther Kläs and Danh Vō in Afterimage
2 July 2022—19 February 2023
Group exhibition at MAXXI, L’Aquila, Italy
The exhibition presents multiple narrative lines, where viewers are invited to embark on a personal journey of exploration and relationship with the works and their meanings. Some of the works in the exhibition seem to capture a particular moment of metamorphosis in which images and things are generated and change before our eyes. Other works, however, seem to be meant to dissolve in terms of symbols and materials. The body is present on more than one occasion: it is a body continuously shaped by history and imagination, in constant transformation, crossing time and reacting to space. Artistic testimonies – from ancient statues to the architecture of the past – are seen as natural organisms capable of regenerating themselves from the reconstitution of fragments.
Afterimage is also a poetic attempt to pay homage to the spatial and human context of L’Aquila, , a place that contemplates countless testimonies of its constant, daily rebirth alongside the memories of the 2009 earthquake. Afterimage examines the coexistence of permanence and transience as a universal condition, rooted in the very nature of human existence, in the destiny of artefacts, places, meanings and images.
