Diego Marcon: La Gola / Marina Xenofontos: View From Somewhere Near

Diego Marcon: La Gola
La Gola (The Belly), Diego Marcon’s film commissioned by the Kunstverein in Hamburg, revolves around the correspondence between Gianni and Rossana. The two characters are portrayed by hyperrealistic dolls with digitally animated eyes and facial expressions. The combination of human voices, analogue dolls, and digital (post-)production brings forth hybrid characters whose status between analogue and digital defies clear distinction. The score of La Gola is composed by Federico Chiari and recorded on a Pietro Corna organ in Bergamo Cathedral.

Everything—the figures, the relationships, the narrative structure, the genre-specific conventions—move toward a climax, while being in a state of irresolve as inner and outer worlds merge in a camp and overinflated magical realism. Although the cast of La Gola is confined to two protagonists, the film reveals a tangled web of relationships characterised by plight and jouissance. In frontal close-ups set in daylight to the sound of chirping birds, Gianni lauds the skills of his cook Baptiste; his life’s aim is seeking heightened forms of pleasure. Rossana, on the other hand, writing in nocturnal darkness shaken by increasing thunder and lightning, describes her mother’s physical suffering and progressing illness. Rossana’s life is defined by the absence of pleasure. However asymmetrical their relationship, they share the inability to recognise the written language of the other as real physical experience. 

La Gola avails itself in auteur conventions, where dialogue comes to bear as only one of several formal filmmaking devices and instruments. Gianni and Rossana are foils, gendered stereotypes of cinema history charged with affect but doomed to make their way from one stage set to the next in an overdetermined and stylistic, but ultimately plot- and actionless vacuum.

Produced by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for BIM’24, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Kunsthalle Wien, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Galerie Buchholz Berlin/Cologne/New York; with the support of Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC) and Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain de Genève (FCAC).

Artist talk, Diego Marcon and Marina Xenofontos: May 4, 2pm
Director’s tour with Milan Ther: May 7, 6pm
Artist talk: June 6, 7pm, with Camilla Romeo, Executive Producer of La Gola, in conversation with Milan Ther

Marina Xenofontos: View From Somewhere Near
In the exhibition by Marina Xenofontos View From Somewhere Near, developed for the Kunstverein in Hamburg, two new works by Xenofontos, Code of Construction (2024) and Sequence (2009-2024), come into dialogue to shed light on objects, places, and spaces that hold significance in shaping a subjectivity perceived as one’s own. Using cultural artefacts, films, and sculptures, the artist explores the reciprocal production of ideology and knowledge in lived and remembered spaces.

Code of Construction consists of a series of modular cabinets, which can be found in Cypriot bedrooms. In the installation Sequence, the recording of a projected film in which an ant struggles is re-projected onto a rotating mirror and reflected into the gallery room and upon the cabinets. Together they question the autonomy of aesthetic forms and their hidden and explicitly present political charge. 

The interwoven connection between Code of Construction and Sequence forms the starting point for an exploration of the material-affective and private-political entanglements that shape our inner and communal life. The exhibition View From Somewhere Near revolves around questions of heritage and inheritance, loss and transformation, genealogy and what it means to be part of a political trajectory that begins before one's own genesis. Cultural artefacts produced by Xenofontos as well as sculptures and readymades function as objects through which social and political transitions become legible. They come together in condensed form in the parental home—as a social, political, historical and architectural construction.

Here, working on the deconstruction and externalisation of lived, analogue, digital, imaginary, material, social, narrative, and emotional conditions, allows the subject to reflect upon its own implicit and complicit place within structures that suddenly become transformable.

Artist talk, Diego Marcon and Marina Xenofontos: May 4, 2pm
Curator’s tour with Dr. Martin Karcher: May 30, 7pm
Director’s tour with Milan Ther: June 18, 6pm

With kind support of the Claussen Simon Stiftung, the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media, and Liv Barrett and Patrick Collins.