PORTLLIGAT
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An exhibition by Amalia Pica
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November 2015 - February 2016
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‘The monotone and rhythmic song of the crickets
and the frogs would stir me sentimentally
by super-posing upon the present twilight anguish
evocative memories of former springtimes.’
-“The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí”, Salvador Dalí, 1943
For her first solo exhibition in Guatemala, Amalia Pica transforms NuMu into a house-museum for crickets, evocative of Salvador Dalí's home in Portlligat, Cadaqués.
In the hallways of the residence, where he lived and worked for over fifty years, Salvador Dalí installed a series of small cages with crickets from Olot. Likewise, he incorporated large scale white eggs to the house's architecture because the eggs, for him, were symbols of love and hope. And it is precisely a visit by Pica to Dalí's residence in Portlligat, Cadaqués, that serves as the point of departure for this exhibition.
The installation in NuMu has been designed so as to be appreciated by the general public and by 25 guatemalan crickets which will inhabit the museum throughout the exhibition. Most specifically, it consists of a retrospective – at a scale of 1:24 – of both artists (Dalí and Pica).
At the same time, within the museum, a microphone will capture the collective cry of the crickets and amplify it outwards through a speaker which will be installed on the flagpole of the museum, altering the soundscape of its surroundings.
Therefore, both the crickets and the visitors will enjoy a unique and very peculiar experience, in which they will be able to appreciate the work of both artists, while forming new friendships.
Amalia Pica’s wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, photography, drawing, film, installation and performance. The works often invite the viewer to reflect on the construction, effectiveness and performative nature of thought and speech. Motivated by a desire for civic participation, Pica’s work sometimes takes the form of temporary interventions into public space often through complicity, celebration and humour.
Pica studied sculpture at ENBAPP in Buenos Aires and completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. Recent exhibitions include One Thing After Another, La Criée Center for Contemporary Art, Rennes, France; Switchboard, MOSTYN, Llandudno, Wales; A ∩ B ∩ C (Line), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Venice Biennial in 2011.
Pica was born in Patagonia, Argentina in 1978 and currently lives and works in London.