Goodnight Morning
Ilaria Vinci

Istituto Svizzero presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy by Ilaria Vinci (Brindisi, 1991; lives in Zurich). Vinci’s work, which encompasses sculpture, installation, and drawing, uses the fantastical as a lens through which to engage with reality. Drawing on the legacy of fairy tales and fables, as well as contemporary fantasy and science fiction, her practice taps into the storytelling power inherent in the iconographies and cultural motifs that populate the collective imagination. Through these elements, Vinci articulates fictional universes that become speculative tools for negotiating the construction of the real.

Goodnight Morning at Istituto Svizzero in Milan presents a series of new sculptures that evoke the liminal passage from wakefulness into sleep, and back. The works seem to appropriate the oniric process by which the day’s information and traumatic events are transformed into objects, places, and scenarios that are familiar yet distorted by a language that transcends rationality. A wishing well – a popular motif devised to construct, manage, and quantify desire – rises from the shipping crate of a freshly delivered work. The felling of trees collides with the topos of the enchanted forest, while newspapers transfigure the day’s horrifying events into hybrid entities that are blown away. United by wood as both organic material and symbolic device, the works engage with cultural archetypes that have endured across the centuries as vehicles for different meanings and forms of power. Just as in altered states of consciousness every thing, object, and place is formed of the same neural substance as the mind imagining it, in the exhibition space every element seems to have originated from the same walnut trunk. Environments, objects, and figures of differing status coexist, much as they do in the hallucinated clarity of our first waking moments, as we grope our way to the bathroom. Unified by Vinci’s sculptural and poetic language, they seem to interrogate the transformative potential of the subconscious as the antechamber of reality.

Curated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti (Head Curator Istituto Svizzero)