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(Un)heard
11.06.2018 - 02.28.2019
Introduction

The exhibition title was adopted from her title for the large wall installation of over 100 noisemakers, such as megaphones, kitchen utensils, drums, and shoes, for street protest and celebration. The objects in Pica’s work, however, were covered with plaster bandages to both mute their acoustic function and preserve their forms, implying a kind of ad hoc archive and archeology. 


In the film and sculpture installation “A ∩ B ∩ C ∩ A ∩ B ∩ C” (∩ is read as intersection), produced in collaboration with filmmaker Rafael Ortega, Pica explored the mathematical device of set theory as a means to formalize infinite semiotic vocabulary. The film and sculptures were based on the performance where four performers collectively arrange different compositions with colored, geometric shapes that were randomly chosen from a cache. The only instruction given was to perform the act of intersection according to set theory---the principle of Venn diagrams---by overlapping the shapes to simultaneously represent and create cooperation among participants for indexing meanings with signs. The soundtrack of the film was an attempt at uttering visual compositions of the non-linguistic system by assigning vowels and consonants to various colors and shapes. This semiotic gesture of encoding communication with signs was rooted in the memory of the dark era of the 1970’s in Argentinean history, when gatherings were closely monitored, and mathematical set theory and Venn diagrams were banned from school programs. Also worth noting is that the geometric forms in Pica’s work give the nod to the history of avant-garde abstraction and the embedded utopian aspirations in concrete and neo-concrete movements from the 1940s to the 1960s, when artists in Brazil and Argentina adopted a number of materials and techniques to explore mechanical and mathematical aesthetics.


Pica further highlighted the significance of listening and interpretation in her installation “Eavesdropper” (2011), in which a drinking glass was affixed to a wall. Placing one’s ear against the bottom of the glass in a hope to clandestinely listen in conversations or sounds next door, the viewer, under other viewers’ watchful eyes, turned the secret mode of surveillance into a social and public act. 

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Images
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Artists
Video

Amalia Pica
(un)heard
2016

Amalia Pica
Eavesdropper
2011

Amalia Pica
A∩B∩C∩A∩B∩C
2014

Amalia Pica
A∩B∩C∩A∩B∩C
2014

Amalia Pica
A∩B∩C∩A∩B∩C
2014