Leone Contini, Maria Laet and Kate Newby - Otium #4

Leone Contini, Maria Laet and Kate Newby Otium #4 May 29–August 11, 2019

IAC, placing research at the heart of its activities, occasionally presents itself as a place of Otium, an interval which favors thinking, meditation and awareness. The gardens, like the interior spaces, are thus opened up in order to initiate a different space-time. Otium #4groups together solo exhibitions by three artists from the same generation, coming from three continents: Leone Contini, Maria Laet and Kate Newby.

With simple and measured gestures, these artists share their desire to initiate other ways of being, in porosity with the environment, to which they accord their attention and their care. They propose a re-centering, an intake of breath, more often than not in connection with the earth, somewhere between germination, collection and reparation. In this slowed down temporality, Leone Contini, Maria Laet and Kate Newby, work to initiate or re-establish links between humans and things, often the most ordinary, that are no longer looked at or that can no longer be seen. Their practice is synonymous with organicity and the infra-thin, with artworks that, similar to “cosmo-gestures,” lead to the transformation of our relationship to the world.

Leone Contini
Leone Contini, trained as an artist anthropologist, lives and works in Tuscany. His practice, which falls somewhere between artistic activity and research, mixes lecture-performances, collective interventions, texts, drawings, videos and long-term collaborations with territories where he operates, in direct contact with a given historical and social context. Intercultural conflicts, migratory flows and their effects on the anthropological and natural landscape are at the heart of his thinking. As a cultivator of the Post-Anthropocene era, Leone Contini sows, harvests and distributes seeds and plants that are for him tools for exploring questions of movement, hybridization, of enrichment between autochthonous and allochthonous cultures and also symbols of sharing, solidarity and exchange between different groups.

Maria Laet
Settled in Rio de Janeiro, Maria Laet, through a process of sedimentation, builds up a sensitive universe which mixes simple and precise human gestures with organic materials and their surfaces. She explores the physical and symbolic properties of materials, often fluid and volatile, such as sand, milk, ink and breath. These materials echo the flow of time and have the malleability required to accompany different forms of reality. In an economy of means, her performances incite one to slow down, to become aware of what usually escapes us. Intimate, almost ritual in nature, they focus on what remains: the imprint, the trace left in the wake of the gesture, the silence which follows the breath. They are sometimes acts of care, of reparation, like when the artist fills in cracks in the ground with milk or when she sews the earth closed with needle and thread.

Kate Newby
Kate Newby, an artist from New Zealand now living in New York, focuses her attention on the small objects found in our every day environment, in order to slow down time so as to appreciate the value held within a moment or a detail. Employing simple gestures and materials, which often involve her own body, she is interested in ephemeral situations, creating encounters with objects which are usually neglected, that she deploys in space with precision and sensitivity. Once she has intensely examined a space and all of its elements, Kate Newby imagines and creates these sensitive environments. Her work blends into the place where it is made. One must accept the possibility of not seeing, unless one is prepared to actively engage with the space. One might then gain access to a number of micro-revelations and experience the cohesion that the artist has shaped between the place and the artwork.

Curator: Nathalie Ergino Assisted by Elli Humbert