Micol Assaël Sleeplessness

dimensione ambiente/dimensions variable

Micol Assaël was born in Italy, but has spent most of her life living abroad. After studying philosophy, she began working in a direction that took her all over the world, from Iceland and Germany to Russia and Greece. From the start of her activity as an artist, between the late 1990s and the early 21st century, she has produced sitespecific installations. She intervenes on spaces, changing their pre-existing structures and creating rooms where visitors often unwittingly find themselves in situations of physical and psychological discomfort. Fascinated by physical, thermostatic, and electrical phenomena, the artist uses obsolete devices and various kinds of technical equipment – power generators, old motors, electrical circuits – to create unstable situations that test visitors’ physical and emotional limits. The installation "Sleeplessness" comprised two adjacent, communicating rooms. In the first, a jet of vapor coming out of an electric socket invaded the space, filling those who walked through it with a feeling of tension and danger. In the other room, a series of refrigerating panels fed by an electric motor with exposed tubes and circuits were used to turn the room into a cold store. The freezing cold produced by the panels, together with the deafening noise coming from the industrial motor, once again placed visitors in a situation of emotional stress that is at once a symptom and an emblem of the invisible energy of the space, which is in turn manifested through the mediation of the body.

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E. Coen, Micol Assaël, exhibition catalogue (Basel, Kunsthalle), Milan 2007. A. Lissoni (ed.), Micol Assaël. Iliokatakiniomumastilopsarodimakopiotita, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Hangar Bicocca), Milan 2015.

Foto Camilla Croce

Purchased from Galleria Bonomo, Bari

Installation