The exhibition hosts the artwork Presente: a donkey with a white coat crosses the construction site of a museum, revealing itself as an unusual, sculptural and solitary presence. The animal leads the viewer to discover the moment anticipating an exhibition, when the halls change and only scaffolding and temporary walls remain.
The creature embodies different roles within the narrative: the artist, a fragile and precious being, and the viewer, a curious observer of the exhibition spaces.
The silent video is about a suspension: space and time are shaped in a single dreamlike moment. The silence of the moving images is filled with the soundscape of the new exhibition space that houses them.
A mediation on the relationship between reality and fiction, between human beings and nature, on animal domestication as a consequence of social rules, themes dear to Furian’s artistic practice. The attention to the clear and photographic image collides with a surreal context, giving space to new ways of interpreting the video.
“[…] The oniric character of the work emerges more clearly, while the softness of the bright environment takes nightmarish turns. The donkey, over-exposed, has no way out. She is limited in her agency, confined into her domestication cage and constantly at the verge of evaporating. Her master, invisible, demonic presence in the shape(less) of a haze. If human or not rests unsolved. As the donkey closes her eyes once again, another doubt rises: what if the animal is milky mist herself? […]” – Extract of the curatorial text by Caterina Avataneo.
