Artists

Bianca Bondi

Press release

The title of this second solo exhibition at mor charpentier, five years after the previous one, distills the core of Bianca Bondi’s research by weaving together thematic strands that shape and redefine much of today’s contemporary visual practice from neohumanism to ecology to emerging ecocentrism. A Temporary Shelter for Permanent Conditions does not merely evoke these theoretical terrains; it absorbs and transforms them, further repositioning Bondi’s artistic practice within the contingency of temporality and, conversely, within the meaning of what endures, what we perceive as permanent in relation to our own existence.

The title brings to mind a text by Rebecca Solnit, one of the artist’s key references, entitled Now and Then (Harper’s Magazine, 2017), in which Solnit opens by defining the present as that which still lives in the memory of those who remain alive, shrinking only when the last direct witnesses of an event disappear. As long as these witnesses exist, she argues, “the now is something bigger than it seems.” Something both vast and precarious is precisely what Bondi’s works suggest: pieces that move freely across scales and formats, engaging with a dissonant, vulnerable beauty made of ancestral, nearly forgotten things that nonetheless inhabit our historical memory and resurface in our present.

The coexistence of generations, evolution, and social and cultural histories is inscribed in Bondi’s environmental installations as well as in her sculptural objects. Her work moves beyond ecology and beyond ecocentrism, aligning closely with the notion of “nomadic subjectivity” theorized by Rosi Braidotti: a mode of being that resists fixed identities. This conceptual nomadism describes a subject capable of traversing multiple identities without rigidity, always in relation with other entities, human and non human, and grounded in the materiality of bodies and historical conditions.

The installation occupying the gallery’s main room consists of a salt landscape supporting an unstable tent, held up by reclaimed branches, hand dyed silk crystallized by salt based chemicals, and stalactite like roots cast from Salix Tortuosa branches and set with precious stones. The tent is a dwelling that refuses permanence; it does not monumentalize. It is an anti architectural gesture, a way of inhabiting that rejects solidity, ownership, verticality. The work evokes the fragility of childhood, experiences of displacement, and the primal need to create a place of protection, material or symbolic.

The ground of salt, an essential element in Bondi’s material grammar, is itself mutable: it slowly pulls moisture from the surrounding environment, subtly turning the branches green over the course of the exhibition.

On the walls, antique medical vitrines appear, recalling on one hand the taxonomic logic of early cabinets of curiosity, where nature and culture coexisted on the same plane; on the other, they echo their later role as spaces for observation and experimentation with the rise of modern science. In these works, which contain objects gathered during the artist’s residencies in Saudi Arabia (2024) and Rome (2024–25), among others, Bondi reactivates a device rooted in the history of knowledge and collecting, situating it within a porous present in which the Wunderkammer becomes an exhibition paradigm capable of invoking desire, archive, colonialism, and an aesthetics of complexity.

The second room also features vitrines that contain symbolic elements combined with molten glass, bottles, poured materials. Mounted vertically on the wall is a bed, uprooted from its domestic function and returned to a verticality that evokes the Crucifixion, echoed by suspended crosses accompanied by inverted bouquets. A sense emerges that everything we once believed in has been overturned.

The exhibition embraces the nomadism of existence and its vulnerabilities, offering a gaze onto an imperfect, fragile world, marked by physical and conceptual structures that are insufficient, precarious, and dramatically contingent.

— Eleonora Milani