2022 - Afasta Nefasta | Presented by Ordet, Milano (ITA)

Afasta Nefasta

Ordet is pleased to present the first solo show in Italy by Brazilian artist Yuli Yamagata (São Paulo, 1989). The title of the exhibition, Afasta Nefasta, is freely inspired by Gilberto Gil’s song Pessoa Nefasta: a play on words that sounds like a spell.

Yamagata’s art moves on the border between dream and reality, drawing inspiration from mass culture and inviting us to embrace the possibilities of her oneiric imagination. An octopus, a snail, a hermit crab and a spider populate the twisted perimeter of the rooms, tentacular and soft, but bearing signs of their human mutation. Yamagata’s creatures are at once comforting and disturbing. The artist employs easily identifiable patterns along with grotesque and surrealistic details, inserting new narratives and infusing a sense of weirdness into the works. Spanning the area between sculpture and painting, her signature works are created by sewing and stuffing a wide range of fabrics, resulting in pictures and shapes that are wonderfully sly. Yamagata plays with her fascination for consumerism, horror novels and ’90s American sci-fi movies, mixing it with her Japanese background references and current mundane habits.

Yamagata often toys with tridimensionality. Her sewn canvases are animated by bulges, and sound and smell are given shapes and forms—a visual translation derived from the comic tradition. The same trick is at play in the exhibition design, where the perimeter of the space has been rotated and rebuilt. The rooms thus become ghosts of their originals, opening up countless dichotomies: ghost and shell, mind and body, inhabitant and shelter. The operation was inspired by the cyberpunk milestone Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese manga series from the late ’80s where people merge with the machines and the word “ghost” is used as colloquial slang for an individual’s consciousness or soul. The very idea of a soft consciousness connected to the body but independent from it is what drove the artist to make these new works. Coming Back Home, for instance, is a gigantic octopus, an alien-looking, famously smart creature. Each tentacle is animated by its own intelligence and in communication with a central superior feeler.

Ever present in Yamagata is the idea of an intelligence that evolves and adapts—squidgy and malleable but surprising—like a mollusk.

Catalogue available here


Milano, Italy
Ordet
April, 2nd to May, 28th, 2022