Liao Wen: By devouring it, I learn about the world
Dates: September 21 – December 15, 2024
Address: Sestiere Dorsoduro 2525, 30123 Venice, Italy


Capsule Venice is proud to present By devouring it, I learn about the world, Liao Wen’s first solo exhibition in Europe and the core of Capsule Venice’s autumn programme. Featuring a completely new set of works specifically conceived for the occasion, this solo exhibition stems from a year of preparation during which Liao Wen has taken her ongoing research about the body, individual and collective rituals, and ancient and contemporary myths, towards unexplored realms. In Liao Wen’s practice, the body - experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject - has value per se, for its intrinsic qualities and physiological needs, but at the same time, it exists as a social and cultural artefact, invested and shaped by a mix of internal impulses and external forces and demands. This exhibition unfolds as a total artwork in which each of the individual pieces has an intrinsic ontological value, but also stands in relation to an overarching narrative placing emphasis and making visible the social, cultural and aesthetic mechanisms and paradigms that underlie the nexus of disgust, violence, and erotism as manifested by the body. Liao Wen questions whether there is any possibility of an overturning of paradigms that instantiate these concepts, and whether a common sense of abjection can be understood as the latent and germinal stage of a new way of perceiving.
The title of Liao’s solo exhibition is inspired by the writer Lin Zhao’s novel Tidal Atlas, the protagonist of which is a giant frog. Because of its bizarre size it becomes an object of desire, captured, collected, and trapped by the people it encounters. This frog’s personal history reflects the story of the Pearl River Basin area from the 19th century, a history characterised by colonisation. Liao Wen was attracted by the giant frog's many swallowing behaviors during its migration. Moving from one place to the other, the frog is propelled by uncontrollable desire and curiosity to swallow some of the things it encounters. Swallowing something corresponds to knowing it, to master its logic from the inside, and to become one with it in a sort of communion. At times, the frog is prey to people’s sense of exoticism, and becomes a projection of their cultural and ideological expectations; at others it is a predator, a hunter killing its quarry, devouring to taste the unknown and foresee its own destiny. It is therefore natural that the mouth and those acts related to the mouth - whether swallowing or vomiting (literally and metaphorically)，- are a recurrent motif of the show. Tears of the Succubus (2024) portrays a female and a male praying mantis in the act of copulation. The mantis is helplessly driven by her nature and unable to keep from eating her partner, while simultaneously, she weeps over the solitary fate her compulsion engenders. In this work, the mouth bears a strong correlation with the eye; the eye is directly referenced by the female gaze, but also indirectly by her tears. In the words of Alberto Moravia in his preface to George Bataille History of the Eye: “The lover wants to bite, devour, murder, destroy the lover, in an impossible effort of communication and identification.” On the back of the female, an element of novelty is added: seeds sprout, as if they were antennas straightened up by desire, or as a way to prolong, in vain, the transient symbiosis between the two bodies. A parallelism as suggested by the title exists between the mantis and the succubus (from the Latin succuba, “lover”), a demon of androgynous appearance who, according to legend, seduced men (especially monks) and women, to make them subject to her will. Liao Wen, here, seems to point to another layer of meaning: the sense of atavist guilt of a liberated feminine sexuality.
If the mantis stands in for the idea of integration in the form of erotic cannibalism, in The Galaxy Turns My Pocket Inside Out (2024) the subject - a kneeling figure with a serpentine tail - is caught while vomiting; once again combining the inside with the outside via a voracious mouth. The galaxy, literally a net “embroidered” with organic waste of different kinds, seaweed and shells, glass beads and gold are visible. Imagery evoking reverse peristalsis is at the heart of many creation myths. “Emergence stories” are often expulsion stories, banishment stories, evacuations. People are always getting thrown out of gardens, angels are expelled from heaven, demons regurgitated from hell, ancestors hurled from the sky or ocean or the mouth of some deity. Even the Big Bang is a kind of expulsion myth. But, if on one hand, a feeling of (re)birth or awakening is evoked by the image of the snake - an image also evocative of the energy activated by the Kundalini serpent - on the other hand, a feeling of unheimlichkeit is conveyed by the visceral interior that, in becoming exteriorised, and, thus, visualised disrupts societal and conventional norms. The largest piece on view is I Swallow the Tide to Light Up (2024). What resembles a biological specimen occupying the central room of the exhibition hall is in fact a remnant of a whale’s body reduced to a group of numbered bones. Here, the whale is a metaphor for all those - no matter whether human or animal - that are martyred by obsessive exploitation or the annihilation of otherness through desire for control. This theme is reinforced by the video of a performance activating this now-inert body, transforming it into a sacrificial token. Moved by the wish to possess or scientifically analyse what seems an alien creature - in other words, to swallow and consume the object of one’s desires - the performers end by becoming perpetrators of the same voracious greed as the colonisers of Lin Zhao’s novel, releasing a sort of collective brutality at the service of a contagious sense of violence. Down the Eye of Polyphemos (2024) explores another type of violence carried out through the eye, but also upon it. What guides the first impulse of desire is caught in a continuous chain of surreal, yet fatal, musings. Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, the eye, an organ of the mind that seeks knowledge, shifts from the orbital cavity into different scenarios, indicating a similar transfer of cognitive faculties from the mind to instinct, from rationality to eroticism. The eye as a symbol of knowledge and all-seeingness common to many religions, here is dragged to a dead end; it is embedded in a sort of ritual in which violence is carried out using all sorts of tools that perforate, penetrate, and violate the bodies of humans, animals, and plants, shifting between methods of preservation and corruption. Tender Residue #1-4 (2024) evokes the body through the inspiration of the shapes and qualities of the seeds of melembu, coco de mer, woolly dyeing rosebay, and crown flower. These sculptures reveal an unexpected yet natural proximity of these seeds with the human body. The work is inspired by the idea of “wasted” seeds falling from trees onto cracks in roads and pavements. Although these seeds are destined to fail to germinate, and are unable to take root, they bloom here with all their strength. The artist uses the forms to evoke ulcerated tissue and secretion forming on wounds. The works oscillate between rebirth and despair, healing and pain. Seeds are filled with vigour and energy, seductive, delicate, but at the same time they are disturbing with their unresolved status and appearance. They possess an almost synaesthetic quality. They are examples of the transformation of waste into a different kind of germination, of the in-betweenness of human realms and the wider biosphere and of the resilience of both. No matter whether human or extra-human, Liao’s subjects remain abject in Kristevan terms, not waiting to be redeemed, rather completely embracing their status as outcasts, their abnormality, making the borders between the acceptable and unacceptable flexible, in a way such that "experience is a voyage to the end of the possible of man.”
Special thanks to Brugnoli for the textile material provided 



Mevlana Lipp: Vista
Dates: September 21 – December 15, 2024
Address: Sestiere Dorsoduro 2525, 30123 Venice, Italy


On the occasion of the launch of its autumn programme, Capsule Venice is delighted to present Vista, Mevlana Lipp’s special project in Project Room 1. Inspired by Lipp’s recent visit to Venice, this solo presentation offers a glimpse of the artist’s long-standing interest in the hybridisation of the natural and the artificial, the human and the floral realms. Vista expresses Lipp’s most recent achievements in colour and composition.
Mevlana Lipp (b. 1989 Cologne, Germany where he currently lives and works) spent his childhood in a small town in the forest of Germany. Since that time, nature has represented not merely a conceptual motif for Lipp, nor a detached and far-away ‘outside’ to be invented. Nature has been an active extension of Lipp’s existence, a heartfelt, spontaneous ‘inside’, a given, responding foremost to personal imperatives rather than aesthetic ones. It was only after entering the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he graduated in 2015, that the artist began to depict nature - especially plants - as a topic, and these subjects became a key element of his sculptural, painterly, and animation practice.
Since ancient times, philosophers and scholars have wondered about plants. Metonymic of nature itself, plants have been considered the privileged object for understanding life. However, in attributing a fundamental role to plants, the vital components of plant bodies have often been removed, mostly reduced to the basic aspects of life itself, and this has relegated the plant world to a position on the border between the living and the non-living, a position of privilege, it must be said, but above all a liminal condition according to a panoply of interpreters. In Aristotle - whose interpretation of the world of plants would rule Western thought for centuries - plants occupy a step above inert bodies, minerals and metals in his scale of beings, but they are below other living things, almost separate from them. Especially within the Aristotelian tradition, this scalarity translated into the subtraction of vital activities, including movement, sensorial experience, and the consciousness of feeling; effectively reducing plants to a condition of minority in comparison with animals. For a very long time, it was thought that plants ‘just live’: they feed, grow, and generate their own kind. Even though Lipp is aware of the complex anatomical organisation, and of the well-developed sensory system of plants - realms that today occupy a special place in the most innovative and future-facing botanical, philosophical, engineering circles - he doesn’t directly investigate discourses regarding the potential of plants from this standpoint. He employs a personal and intimate approach towards them. The intrinsic, apparent quality of plants to exist in a more ‘basic’ way was what attracted him at first to their world. According to the artist: Plants don’t speak with each other; they just touch and feel. They are there per se, so their life and psychology are not as ‘complicated’ as those of humans. When you walk into the forest, you take a look at all the existing connections, at how things interact with each other without fear. Plants don’t run the risk of hurting each other’s feelings. Everything seems to have its own place. It all goes back to a very basic instinct. It was the artist’s longing for this kind of distillation to the essence that allowed
plants to gradually, yet firmly, find their way into his work in both material and metaphorical form. In Lipp's oeuvre, plants and flowers, though inspired by real examples, exist as fictions. They are not intended to be portrayed in accurate and scientific ways. Even though initially the plants portrayed by Lipp had a direct link to his immediate surroundings, or to plants he used to grow himself, they became more abstract elements, based on reconfigurations of leaves and roots that, although they begin as sketches, soon transmute into new entities at the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. Flowers and plants are imbued with sinister and surreal tones, acting as signifiers that stand in for humanity, and for a wide range of human emotions spanning from fear to sensuality, from empathy to impishness. But, differently from humans, whose behaviours are processed by sociality and culture and, therefore, are often influenced by inhibitions, in Lipp’s works plants explore each other, touch each other, communicate with each other based on instinctual interactions, in a ‘thoughtless’ way, a spontaneous and unrestrained way. Lipp’s most recent body of work exhibited in Venice introduces formal and conceptual breakthroughs in the artist’s progress. Lipp’s colour palette has become warmer; instead of fluorescent hues of blue and green, the artist has enriched compositions with red, orange, and purple tones, signaling a modal shift; still fluorescent but subtler. Images of bars, evoking the patterns of metal window bars that the artist has seen while walking around Venice intersect with the flowers and plants is new as well. With their geometric, yet sensuous, lines they stand in sharp contrast to Lipp’s floral patterns, while, at the same time, complimenting them. The bars act as ‘windows within windows’, visual hints of the vistas the artist refers to in the title of his project. But perhaps what strikes the viewer most is that, for the first time in Lipp’s work, bars stress the presence of an outside and of an inside, of a formal, but most of all conceptual, separation between the target of an idealised longing and the real conditions of living in the collective world, in a society where humans don’t follow the same patterns as plants, and experience feelings of not belonging and distress; feelings that nevertheless plants can help to mitigate. Plants are, for Lipp, both an example of endless mystery and of resilience. They are a cure for the artist’s own melancholia, a safe haven where one may abandon or reconcile withone’s own inner self. Plants also provide a new way of understanding the world and ourselves; that even though not reliant on human language or grammar they are able to speak and inspire new ways for humans to be human.



Alessio de Girolamo: Real Time
Dates: September 21 – December 15, 2024
Address: Sestiere Dorsoduro 2525, 30123 Venice, Italy


Capsule Venice is delighted to present Real Time, the gallery’s first collaboration with Italian artist Alessio de Girolamo (b. 1980, Sanremo, Italy; currently lives and works in Lecce, Italy). Hosted in the annex gallery space and the garden shed (Project Rooms 2 and 3) during La Biennale di Venezia - 68th International Festival of Contemporary Music, Real Time unveils the artist’s most recent audio and video experiments with the eponymous software Real Time. Developed over the past few years in close
collaboration with LIM - Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale (Music Informatics Laboratory) at Università degli Studi di Milano, the software Real Time represents a significant breakthrough in the way that a musical composition is conceived. It uses the elements of the natural soundscape closest to the notes of a chosen musical score, without any pre-sampling or pitch alteration, to create a brand-new score in which the natural and the artificial meet and inevitably clash. This software replaces the “silenced notes” in the original track with the closest acoustic frequencies. Real Time highlights the breach between the spontaneous, non-numeric, circular, and aleatoric patterns followed by musical composition as a prod- uct of an unaware soundscape and the time-based, numerical logic of traditional musical composition that resulted from a composer’s awareness and intention. The software thus represents an (occasional- ly impossible) attempt to reconcile these two antithetical systems of thought.
The project specifically conceived for Capsule Venice revolves around two interconnected bodies of work: Joog Box (2024), a custom-made juke box covered in super-mirror stainless steel displayed in the garden shed and two main projections Real Time (Venice, Sept. 21, 2024) (2024) intertwined with a series of hand-drawn scores on canvas Real Time / Music Score (Venice, Sept. 21, 2024) (2024), and Music Score (Venice, Sept. 21, 2024 No.1) (2024), all arranged in the annex gallery space.
Even though the first jukeboxes were known by many names back in the 1890s, mostly “nick- el-in-the- slot machines,” the roots of the word “jukebox” go much further back than its first reference in Time magazine to the jook houses of the period. Specifically, the term originated in the Sea Islands, just off the Carolinas, where Gullah, a creole of several West African languages and English that grew up around slaves, was brought to the region in the eighteenth century. In Gullah, the word “joog/jook” meant “disorderly” or “living wickedly.” A jook house was a sort of dance hall, gaming room, and brothel, all rolled into one. Joog Box was purposely selected, with this spelling, as the title for the piece on view. On first hearing, the sounds emitted when a visitor pushes the button of the juke box is a anarchy of harmonies, an auditory derailment that seems barely related to the scores listed on the screen, representing the original scores from which the compositions depart. The twelve tracks selected pay homage to the work of composers spanning two hundred years, from the Renaissance to the Romanticism, who once lived and worked in Venice or who are somehow related to the city’s history or to one another.
This selection does not aspire to be a philologically complete, strictly historical survey; it is rooted first of all in the artist’s own taste and understanding and it offers scores spanning a wide range of styles and eras, from the founder of the Venetian school Adrian Willaert (1490-1562) to Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), from Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) to Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). What the audience hears comes from a specific process that overturns the usual compositional grammar.
The soundscape—including animal, natural, and human sounds—was recorded using a microphone, then transmitted to the Real Time software, which identifies the sound frequencies of the landscape and attempts to make a continuous match between the frequencies and notes of the original scores that run silently in MIDI format. Whenever the software detects and decodes —without manipulating— the sounds or noises in the soundscape that are most like the notes in the original score, the relevant note in the soundscape is captured by the software and linked to the relevant notes in the chosen piece. In this way, the sounds from the natural soundscape replace the original orchestra. When no sound is found, there remains a void, causing a feeling of disjunction where the original score interferes with the one performed by the soundscape. The syntax of this musical discourse completely reverses the intentionality of the traditional way of composing; it is now replaced by randomness, by a fortuitous, chance incident, an unintentional miracle that determines the matching of natural frequencies with notes from the original score. This process has more in common with performing than traditional composing. All of the components involved in the soundscapes become “catalysers of sonic activity” to use the words of Max Neuhaus. What results is a score that is the product of collective endeavor, prioritizing relationships among agents, whether human or not, rather than a given subject or object. Everything is involved in a participatory exchange. The videos projected in the annex gallery space combine images captured in the Giardini area, which portray “catalysers” moving in space as they create a new version of Antonio Vivaldi’s La Primavera
(Spring). Here, the audience witnesses a visualization of the openness of the score, of time, of a never-ending process, in which the flow of life and nature—which has no consciousness of numbers or timelines—encounters the rigid logic of humans who rely on numbers to compose. This real-time, unconscious composition brings an unexpected aspect to the work going beyond standards of beauty or harmony, because the actual “actors” have no sense of being involved in creating a new piece, they just do it by existing, thus revealing a new sense of authorship. For listening purists, the natural and human element of the soundscape is a bug in the system; it is a crazy monad, almost interfering with the sacredness of the original score. In reality it is the means that allows a reversal of perspective from music conceived as a tool for harmony and consolation to music as awareness of the existence of two separate systems, distinct and, irreconcilable. Alessio de Girolamo’s work shows from the outside how a whole system of thought not just of composition that employs a circularity and is not based on numerical relationships operates. When the frequencies adhere, a new sound is born. The bug is the feature.



Luca Campestri: A Breadcrumb Trail
Dates: October 24 – December 15, 2024
Address: Sestiere Dorsoduro 2525, 30123 Venice, Italy


Capsule Venice is delighted to present A Breadcrumb Trail, the first solo show at the gallery by Luca Campestri (b. 1999, Florence, Italy; lives and works in Bologna, Italy). Consisting of a set of narrative fragments that make up a nocturnal landscape inhabited by ambiguous, affective, even hostile presences, the exhibition intends to the central moment of the traditional fairy tale of Hänsel and Gretel, placing the visitor at the centre of the story. Abandoned for a second night in the woods by their parents, having managed to find their way home the previous day thanks to the trick of the pebbles documented in the tale, the two siblings cast a look of despair on the trail of crumbs, which has now been devoured by nocturnal animals. The exhibition queries fragile methods for orientation and positioning, and explores the need to find a way home, all while that "home" is not necessarily the right place to be. Home, rather, is the origin of the feeling of loss itself. The works that make up this solo
show outline narrative, conceptual, and formal references relating to the fairy tale of Hänsel and Gretel, as well as reflections of a hauntological nature, on the modalities of vision, and on the photographic medium.



(Texts by Manuela Lietti)



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