The artist duo Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano have unveiled a new work which takes aim at the anti-LGBTQ+ stance of Italy’s right-wing government.
The piece, Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas, comprises 30 large-scale aluminium sculptures of fantastical hybrid creatures which stand beneath an egg-shaped moon. Each sculpture doubles as a musical instrument which can be played in an ad hoc way, creating sounds that are both harmonious and jarring.
The work— a joint commission between TBA21-Academy and Audemars Piguet Contemporary—is on show in the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo in Venice. TBA21-Academy, the ecologically minded offshoot of the contemporary art foundation TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary), has turned the church into a dedicated venue called Ocean Space.
Kosovo-born Halilaj said that the installation was about “queer futures” and "plural togetherness". Halilaj and Urbano are a couple professionally and personally, but usually work individually. “As a couple coming here, and also [in relation to] Italy politically, it was important to bring an egg made by two boys. There is space for everyone in society.”
An exhibition project statement adds: “[The egg sculpture] evokes possibilities of alternative future forms of life, transformation and parenthood to be reimagined in order to break the notion of fixed or stable ‘natural’ identities that in human societies results in systemic discrimination of queer individuals and families.”
Last month, Italy’s far-right government under prime minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, instructed Milan’s city council to stop registering the children of same-sex parents. Meloni, who was elected last September, said in a speech last June: “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death.”
The duo’s sculptures-cum-instruments will be taken on to the streets for a monthly procession, culminating in performances in the church activated by a cast of musicians. “We like that they will become a parade in the city,” Halilaj says. The artists oversee the performances dressed as seagulls. Audrey Teichmann, curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary—an arm of the Swiss watchmakers—helped conceive and organise the installation.
TBA-21 Academy also presents in another part of the church new works by the Paris-based artist Simone Fattal. Both exhibitions, overseen by the independent curator Barbara Casavecchia, have the joint title Thus waves come in pairs, a line in a poem by Fattal’s late partner, the Lebanese artist and poet Etel Adnan. The poem “reminds us that we need to think and rethink in plural ways and practice forms of togetherness”, says Casavecchia in a statement.
Thus waves come in pairs, Ocean Space, Venice, until 5 November
