Liminal

“There is no limit without a transgressive gesture, nor transgression without the confirmation of a limit”

——Judith Ravel

The independent institution WU SPACE, based in Shenyang and founded in 2018 as a place to explore the multiplicity of contemporary art, is pleased to present “Liminal”, the first solo exhibition in China by the artist Filippo Berta, curated by Zhao Lu and Angel Moya Garcia. The exhibition presents an overview of one of the most interesting artists in the Italian context, especially for his ability to consciously reject pre-established reference coordinates, renounce the homologation of expectations and assume the need to lose the coherent perfection of similarities. An overall narrative of fifteen years of work in which the artist creates choral works that affect, delineate and question the concept of limit.

A story through images in which the simplicity of some elementary, determined, stubborn and reiterative gestures intertwines with the fragility of the human being that is expressed in different forms of borders and dualisms. By catalyzing the connections between individuals and groups and often investigating the unstable balance between people within their communities, Filippo Berta manages to ask questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures and groups in a constantly evolving world. An attempt to activate communities, to analyze the subjective and individual dynamics within a community, regardless of the language used as the final formalization of the work. In fact, the exhibition shows how video, installation, performance or photography are nothing more than a way or a means to tell the diversity inherent in the human being. And it is every single individual who participates in developing and giving life to a whole in which the tension transpires towards the public who, consequently, collaborates in turn in the construction of a single social body.

In this sense, the exhibition unfolds as a circular choreography, composed of four acts, each of which affects a different version of the same instance and develops into different declinations of a single urgency. An intimate boundary, a social boundary, an authorial boundary and an existential boundary construct a lyrical work in four parts that overturns the principles of its own harmony, giving rise to a constant succession of intervals, silences and requests that lead us towards an elsewhere to be discovered.

In this way, the circularity of the exhibition guides the visitor into a vortex of representations in which each work introduces the next, activating a series of relationships and references from which an extremely coherent path emerges, characterized by the obsessive and obstinate research on the role and responsibility of each individual in building and forming part of their own community.