Amalia Pica: Chisenhale Gallery, London

In 2012 Chisenhale Gallery presented a solo exhibition by Amalia Pica, which featured newly commissioned works across sculpture, photography, installation and performance. The exhibition elaborated on Pica’s interest in the social act of listening, sites of celebration and technologies of mass communication. The exhibition also marked the culmination of Pica’s year-long offsite project I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011/12).

Pica’s wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, performance and film. For her exhibition at Chisenhale, Pica also focused on the gallery space as a public site, works were situated in areas usually excluded from the arena of exhibition display. The front of the building was draped with multi-coloured festoon lighting; at the rear of the gallery, music was broadcast from a storage room and one work was on view in the office.

In the gallery space itself, Pica installed a sculpture that doubled as an architectural divide and listening device for viewers, another was activated by performers over the course of the exhibition and a wall pasted image depicted a scene staged upon ‘common’ farmland.  Fabricated out of lo-fi materials – cardboard, string, photocopies and recycled cans – these works emphasised the latent conversational and vernacular form of Pica’s images and objects.

I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are is described by Pica as a ‘nomadic sculpture’. Over the course of one year, after leaving her studio in July 2011, the work was hosted by residents of Tower Hamlets on a week-to-week basis. 

I am Tower of Hamlets...addressed the conventions of participatory art practice and public sculpture, it presented an intimate encounter with the artwork in which the immediacy of individual perception was made paramount. The project provided the cue to Pica’s subsequent collection of works, which continue to explore the frameworks and cultural resonances of sculpture and interventions into public space, while dealing with ideas of collective memory through the precise materiality of the sculptures she produces.

Amalia Pica’s exhibition was her first solo exhibition in the UK and was co-produced in partnership with Modern Art Oxford. A second chapter of the work was developed for an exhibition held in December 2012.