Uri Aran: Untitled (I Love You)

The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee—museo Madre, Naples presents Untitled (I love you), the first retrospective in an Italian museum of the American artist Uri Aran (Jerusalem, 1977), curated by director Eva Fabbris. 

The title of the exhibition is taken from one of Aran’s first and most famous videos, and accompanies a journey that is conceived as a retrospective and, by covering approximately 800 square meters, brings together over 170 works, developed through major international loans, the restaging of historical installations and a series of newly conceived works created specifically for Madre. The exhibition, which comprehensively recounts the evolution of his practice from the early 2000s to the present day, will be accompanied by the publication of a catalog. 

Aran works with hybrid languages (sculpture, video, sound, performance, narration) that challenge traditional disciplinary categories: a practice perfectly in tune with Madre’s vocation to read the contemporary scene as a porous, unstable space in constant redefinition.

Many of his works take shape from common and seemingly mundane objects—desks, office supplies, everyday tools, found items—which the artist reorganizes according to a logic he himself defines as ‘bureaucratic formalism.’ These devices refer to repetitive gestures—measuring, ordering, moving, classifying—evoking both the idea of system and hierarchy and the emotional and sad humour of everyday life.

The table, the desk, and the work surface thus become places where time, discipline and imagination come together. In his research, the notion of sentimentality plays a central role, understood as a process of amplification and the codification of shared emotion. Animals, domestic objects, images linked to childhood, rewarding and learning become tools through which Aran explores predefined emotional mechanisms, highlighting our complicity with affective and cultural stereotypes.

Spanning sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, and video, Aran adopts a fluid approach to media, ignoring traditional boundaries. In his video works, in particular, the artist consciously uses the tools of the cinematic language—voiceover, editing, and repetition—isolating them and making them explicit, in order to reveal their manipulative power and to construct fragmented, open, unstable narratives.

Among the key elements of his compositions is the use of passport-sized photographs. The quintessential means of institutionalized recognition, passport photos appear in Aran’s works without any indication of the nationality or biography of those who appear in them, suggesting a departure and distancing from the mechanism of identity assignment. According to Aran, the work is completed by this very question—one destined to remain unanswered yet which nevertheless reveals a shared need to orient ourselves through the reading of connections and links, in a dimension that is just as social as it is existential.

The exhibition at Madre is configured as a unified and immersive environment, in which the individual works dialogue with each other as parts of a single system. Rather than offering unambiguous meanings, the project invites the public to embrace uncertainty, accepting the multiplicity of interpretations and the possibility that meaning may remain partial, provisional, and in constant flux. In this sense, Aran’s practice suggests that, although a fundamental tool of organization and knowledge, language is never sufficient to contain the complexity of experience. His works are situated in this very interstice, where words fall short and meaning remains open, unstable, entrusted to a plurality of perceptions and relationships.

Accompanying the exhibition, a series of events will enliven the Madre museum’s public program, hosting international curators and artists dynamics that run through Aran’s practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by a program of educational activities for children. The program will be complemented by guided tours for adults, dedicated to exploring the themes and processes that shape Uri Aran’s practice.