Elmira Abolhassani 

Peri-phéro rethinks the coordinates within which our senses encounter and arrange reality. Animating the exhibition is the unexplored fecundity of what lies around the themes catalyzers of our attention, as well as the conviction that you cannot effectively focus on a topic without having firstly de-centralized your gaze, without having patiently walked on the borderline that circumscribes it.

The greek verb peri-phéro – I bring you around, in its English translation – is therefore primarily a declaration of intent, an official assumption of responsibility and an invitation along a path that unravels into the peripheries of three places deeply frequented by artistic and cultural narratives: the body, the city and the individual. With the term periphery we mean the marginal in its broadest sense: marginal is every border zone, but it is also – following the multiple semantic stratifications of the notion of margin – what appears irrelevant, insipid, or despicable.

The exhibition explores a sort of somatic topology that embraces this range of meanings and problematizes it: we interpret as peripheries of the body both its proper extremities and all the parts that – for carelessness or superficiality – go unnoticed, or that – for modesty, shame or, again, seduction – are hidden from view.