Amalia Pica – babble, blabber, chatter, gibber, jabber, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, yada yada yada

Amalia Pica (b. 1978) works with sculpture, photography, film, and installation. The exhibition in C-salen is her first major exhibition in Northern Europe. It presents new works from 2010 produced in a variety of techniques, such as performative and sculptural objects, film and photographs, texts, and ready-mades. Together, the individual works form a unified whole—an installation.

Pica explores our ability to express ourselves, as well as the performative nature of thought and language. In her works, she investigates the distance to the person at whom signs (speech, gestures, singing) are directed. Examples include works based on: a deaf monologue; singing in the shower or on stage in front of a large audience; flag signals used to send messages over long distances; someone waiting for someone else to say something. All the works “speak about” speaking (or making contact) with another person, who may be nearby or far away.

Amalia Pica’s work is often driven by a longing for active civic participation. In earlier works such as On Education (2008) and Speaker’s Corner (2008), Pica strives to create condensed moments of cultural intimacy, or moments in which her (or others’) artistic practice attempts to intervene practically in public life. She works conceptually, with an inventive and playful sharpness in her titles.

A catalogue will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition, including both earlier and more recent works, an essay by the German curator Jochen Volz, and an interview by the English writer and editor Francesca Gavin.

Amalia Pica was born in 1978 in Neuquén, Argentina. She lives and works in London, England. She has participated in group exhibitions at, among others, the Hayward Gallery, London (2010), Kunsthalle Basel (2008), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007).