Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève

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.

Holding in her mind Dorothea Tanning’s painting Some Roses and their Phantoms (1952) and its sickening presentation of objects as between states of being, Wardill made a film that also hovers between definitions. The architecture of the Gulbenkian auditorium in Lisbon, its colors and sense of being lost in time accompany us through a loop where a man wanders the building at night, followed by something that is not human. Through the care and paranoia with which she approaches the digital image, the artist investigates the past’s haunting of the present and the remnants of textures longing to be touched. Wardill’s work takes an interest in the appropriation of models to express ideas and the way in which fixed scenarios become exemplary. She explores the opacity of communication to deconstruct the way in which materials or the implication of the material are used to elucidate ideas.

Aria, a film about queer parents, identity and family constructions. It is through a series of portraits, of people leaning their faces over her belly that the artist proposes a diversity of stories and reflections on motherhood, parenthood, the desire or not to have a child, descent, and childhood. Entirely shot using smartphones, the film proposes an intimate journey, told via sensitive, fun or moving words, a contemporary family album.