Exhibition: Friday 2 September - Saturday 15 October 2011

Curated by Fiona Parry

Cubitt Gallery presents the first UK exhibition by Neapolitan artist Giulia Piscitelli. Working in the gallery throughout August, Piscitelli will create Contested Zones, a new wall-based installation, alongside sculptural works.

Over 20 years Giulia Piscitelli has developed a practice working in drawing, sculpture, video, photography, performance and textiles, including “tapestries” with ghost-like images bleached into found fabric. Mending and recovering things that have been broken and abandoned is an essential process for Piscitelli. She appropriates objects as artworks, drawing out more intensely the signs of their former lives. Her work is rooted in the things, emotions and situations that are often overlooked, revealing the harsh realities, the small joys and cruel absurdities in the struggles of ordinary life.

The central piece in Piscitelli’s exhibition at Cubitt is Contested Zones, 2011, inspired by her immediate surroundings. Off the coast of Naples is the volcanic Isle of Nisida, which houses a NATO naval base and juvenile detention centre. Prohibiting access to the island are broken through and patched up metal railings. Appearing like an abstract drawing, Piscitelli will re-create these railings around three walls of the gallery using colourful paper streamers. She warns us not to be fooled by the bright and weak appearance of this paper barrier. “It marks your limits; never lower your guard.”

Giulia Piscitelli was born in 1965 in Naples, Italy and lives in Naples. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2011); and Galleria Fonti, Naples (2009 and 2006). Group exhibitions include Illuminations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and When things cast no shadow, 5th Berlin Biennial (2008).