Have You Ever Seen Two Animals Fighting?
Artist: Valentina Furian
curated by Yueh-Ning Lee
Final exhibitions of the 19th edition of the Young Curators Residency Programme, coordinated by Michele Bertolino
In the profound abyss of night, the widely-opened eyes search the world veiled in opacity. So to ask, Have You Ever Seen Two Animals Fighting? Valentina Furian’s solo exhibition takes its title and draws inspiration from Giorgio de Maria’s 1977 novel The Twenty Days of Turin, whose story unfolds from an investigation into mysterious incidents surrounding the insomniacs. The exhibition embodies site-specific new bodies of work by Furian to envision a speculative scenario, where the hybrid monuments are suspended and activated in the delicate thresholds of day and night, past, present, and future. Furian’s practice spans time-based installations, moving images, photography, and drawings, exploring the relationship between human and more-than-human agencies. A recurring key element of her work is the performativity of animals, symbolising the liminal space between fiction and reality, where nature and humans are entangled and boundaries dissolve.
Have You Ever Seen Two Animals Fighting? expands upon Furian’s approach from previous works Eclissi and La nostra lunga notte, while further addressing the contemporary issues of surveillance, silent violence and the theme of vulnerability embedded in the body of monuments. Through a posthuman lens, the work dissects power structures of predators and prey, human and more-than-humans, body and gaze. The mirroring landscape implicitly reflects the crisis in the turbulent emotional and political terrain of our time—the weight of selected memories, the hyper-exposure to privacy, the friction of socio-political conflict, until our eyes begin to dry out.
When the night falls, it activates the desire and fragility, our sleepless bodies remain vertical, poised to flee, alert in the shadows. The exhibition invites the viewers to explore what we choose to memorialise, while stepping into the portals of tension and tenderness. When the sun comes out, whether it might be too dazzling to see what truly lingers beneath the surface.
Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Gurarene
Saturday and Sunday 12 - 7 pm (free entry)
