At the Nivola Museum, the exhibition "Pratza 'e domo. A semiotic house never built" continues from 29 June and can be visited until 3 November 2024 . A semiotic house never built”, a project created by Nairy Baghramian for the museum following the award of the 2023 Nivola Sculpture Prize. The exhibition includes works by artists and designers Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Nicolas Hsiung, Janette Laverrière, Rosemary Mayer, Win McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Oscar Murillo, Paulina Olowska, Monika Sosnowska, Mariantonia Urru.

Baghramian's title “Pratza 'e domo” (literally “house square”) takes up the expression that in Sardinia designates the space in front of a house, often equipped with a bench or chair on which it is possible to stand; an area of transition that is not clearly delimited, at the same time private and public, individual and collective. This space, both physical and conceptual, is linked to the idea of the “semiotic house never built”, a project carried out by Baghramian in 2008 at NAK - Neuer Aachener Kunstverein together with Janette Laverrière and Henrik Olesen (Affairs). A semiotic house which was never built).

The house is conceived by the artist as a utopian space that has never been built and may not be, but the mere fact of imagining it evokes its possibility of existence, making it believable. It is a temporary environment in which to develop or set aside ideas and projects, in a process of continuous elaboration and reassembly of fragments. Each fragment is an independent creation and at the same time it contributes “with a backward movement”, as Baghramian says, to the definition of a context.

The project for the Nivola Museum (how to get there) combines a series of aspects that have always been present in Nairy Baghramian's practice. One of these is her interest in the boundaries between public and private space, external and internal, which she explored as potentially permeable and therefore charged with tension. If in the artist's previous works the tension is generally outlined between the institutional space of the museum or gallery and the social space, in this case the institutional space is ideally identified with the domestic one, also thanks to the shape of the exhibition environment, a former washhouse with a gabled roof, reminiscent of a house. In the house, the museum room takes on the characteristics of welcome and protection, it becomes an enclosure in which different artistic discourses can coexist and resonate together. The fusion between public and private space characterizes both the new sculpture by Baghramian To Let, mounted on the facade of the building and in dialogue with those of Phyllida Barlow, and the image of the work January '17 Calendar (Der Fuß des Künstler, 2017) by Win McCarthy - which appears as an ephemeral gesture in the exhibition poster - and in which the spatial and temporal axes converge in a hybrid between calendar and plan.
Another border area that attracts Baghramian's attention is that between art and design, between aesthetic dimension and ornamental dimension, investigated in the exhibition through deliberately hybrid works such as the chair-sculpture Chaise L'Afghane (1987) by Janette Laverrière, the work dress painted by Arepas y Tamales (2022) by Oscar Murillo, the stools by Nicolas Hsiung or, by Baghramian herself, the monumental carpet woven to Samugheo by Mariantonia Urru (whose design alludes to the minimalist idea of negative space, dear to the artist and recalled by the vision of the “sacred well” of Santa Cristina in Sardinia) and the sculpture-handle applied to a door in the museum's courtyard. The unfinished, the unfinished, the unrealized are also recurring themes in the work of
Nairy Baghramian, whose often apparently fragile or incomplete sculptures hint at discomfort, a difficulty of adaptation that forces them to stand on crutches or to lean on architecture, as in the series Scratching the Back created for the Facade Commission of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2023.

Precariousness, incompleteness and ephemerality return to the house under construction on a tree painted by Paulina Olowska (Tree House, 2016), in the aerial structure of cellophane, ribbons, wood and other materials by Rosemary Meyer (Midwinter Ghost, 1980-81/2024), in the crude and temporary works of Phyllida Barlow (Untitled, 2010), in the fragments of fences by Monika Sosnowska (Gate, 2019), as well as in the swirling rhythms of the abstract compositions of Julie Mehretu. Baghramian is not new to collaborative experiences and has long since developed the practice of transforming invitations for personal exhibitions into collective experiences with other artists, such as the already mentioned Janette Laverrière, Jean Timme, the choreographer Maria Hassabi, and more recently Julie Mehretu, with whom she has been engaged in a dialogue that has lasted for years, culminating in the collaboration for the creation of the sculptural frames that Baghramian designed for the Mehretu Transpaintings included in the Ensemble exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in 2024. As in the Off Broadway exhibitions at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco (2014) and Open Dress at the Museum Abteiberg in Germany (2015), at the Nivola Museum collaboration and participation are decidedly at the forefront of his work, with a project that brings together a group of artists linked to Baghramian by various affinities and that reflects on the utopian and subversive potential of collaborative work, in a field so ideologically linked to personal expressiveness, if not to the idea of the solitary and tormented artist-hero, like that of contemporary art. Finally, the concept of the exhibition recalls the exile condition of Costantino Nivola and his wife Ruth Guggenheim, who fled fascist Italy in 1938 to settle in New York and returned occasionally to Europe and Sardinia only after the end of the war.

Watch the TGR Rai Sardegna video on the exhibition "Pratza 'e Domo.

A semiotic house never built” https://www.facebook.com/100065016840945/videos/1274319356871292

With the contribution of: Autonomous Region of Sardinia, Municipality of Orani, Foundation of Sardinia.

Exhibition design: Craftsmanship and Design by Pietro Fois
Printing: Bioaction by Fabio Milia
Graphic design: Heart Studio
Trasporti: Tiemme