On the event of Blood Most Treasured, Shahryar Nashat’s solo exhibition on view now at Istituto Svizzero in Rome, the artist sat down with fellow artist Alessandro Di Pietro for a dialog formed by complicity. Starting with Nashat’s scenographic, although largely imperceptible, interventions into the Istituto constructing, their dialogue expands right into a broader reflection on the bodily and conceptual transformations that artworks bear throughout completely different contexts. Di Pietro, whose apply navigates speculative fiction, artwork historic détournement, and the aesthetics of monstrosity, attracts out themes of possession, reminiscence, and bodily trade in Nashat’s work. Collectively, they discover the fluidity of creative id and the ghosts that hang-out each of their practices—from “daddy” Paul Thek to cinematic archetypes—in addition to the erotics of matter, the place want and decay, presence and absence, constantly reshape the lifetime of an paintings.
ALESSANDRO DI PIETRO
Once I traveled to Rome to go to your solo present at Istituto Svizzero, Blood Most Treasured, I used to be met by the curator, Gioia Dal Molin. She launched me to the exhibition by putting explicit emphasis in your preliminary acts of reworking the area and the lighting, earlier than even beginning to focus on the works.
SHAHRYAR NASHAT
The Villa Maraini is so, so heavy in Rococo shenanigans and so out of contact in some way with the up to date that I needed to retrofit its outdatedness earlier than I may start to think about what to point out.
ALESSANDRO
I prefer it. Gioia informed me about your undertaking exactly via these interventions, such because the light-colored carpet, the chilly lighting, and the pink movie utilized to the home windows. As quickly as you begin trying on the works, and the dialogue between them, these parts grow to be a type of lens via which to look at—spy on?—them within the rooms. I’d prefer to ask you: As soon as the area was altered, what was the primary work you put in, or the one you knew can be positioned in that particular spot?
SHAHRYAR
A lot of the works got here from my 2024 present at MASI Lugano, Streams of Spleen. It was a really completely different exhibition. Identical works, completely different story. On the Istituto, I discover the physique as a vessel for liquids, whether or not it’s a fountain, two mouths exchanging saliva, or the uncooked presence of a bloody beef carcass. After that, the scenography adopted naturally. There’s a distinction between hanging works and putting in a present; I’m at all times extra within the latter. Being provided an area to make an exhibition needs to be handled as a chance to have interaction your work with a bodily area and context. Too usually, artists merely “distribute” their work within the area in a mechanical approach: “Here’s a six-meter wall. Let’s hold 4 equidistant work.” Are you aware what I imply? In the event you’re not going to play with the area, or problem it in any approach, it’s possible you’ll as effectively simply make a PDF.
ALESSANDRO
I agree, and I admit that more often than not (once I can), I spend my finances only for the area [laughs]. Perhaps it is a widespread trait between Virgos and Capricorns?
The sensation I had whereas visiting your exhibition, primarily considering of the “character sculptures” Boyfriend.JPEG (2022), Lover.JPEG (2023), and Hustler.JPEG (2024), is that they appear engaged in a slow-motion choreography. The area is the lettuce you’ve ready for the arrival of the snails. “The three,” leaving a path of slime behind them, coming from afar, from different exhibitions, very slowly however in a relentless and ineluctable motion that by no means stops—they transit via the areas, they don’t settle, they set up a brief and reciprocal relationship. To the human eye, they place themselves, when in actuality they’re merely passing via to new relational property.
SHAHRYAR
It started with a present I did at Gladstone Gallery, New York, in 2022. I titled all of the works Boyfriend.JPEG, a reputation that carried a number of layers of that means. As sculptures, they exist as bodily objects inside the exhibition area. JPEG means they’re stand-ins for one thing with an uncompressed unique elsewhere on the earth. And Boyfriend, after all, pointed to the longing I used to be feeling on the time.
This act of summoning one thing not absolutely there grew to become a recurring modality that I carried via two extra exhibitions—Happier Than Ever at David Kordansky, Los Angeles, in 2022, and It’s Not As much as You at Gladstone, Brussels, in 2024—with the identical titling conference, Lover.JPEG and Hustler.JPEG. Typically, a piece from a previous sequence reappeared, however its completely different title shifted its that means and reframed its narrative. In Rome, all three are current. Identical work, completely different story, once more.
ALESSANDRO
“Identical work, completely different story.” I can’t assist however replicate on the truth that artists such as you and Paul Thek (whom we each love) information the lifetime of the works and deal with them as “sentient” presences within the new environments the place they’re positioned. For instance, Thek’s Loss of life of a Hippie was created in 1967 and initially exhibited by Steady Gallery inside a ziggurat, then at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in an set up titled Ark, Pyramid (1971), introduced inside its personal transport case, coated by a blanket and onions. Ultimately, the work was destroyed, subtracted from the world, but it surely continues to reside via the pictures of it by Peter Hujar, some collages, and the recollections of those that liked it, like Mike Kelley, who wrote about it in his textual content “Loss of life and Transfiguration” (1992).
In your case, speaking concerning the Rome exhibition, I used to be really struck by the truth that, along with transmuting the identical materials into new narratives, there have been additionally new traces added to the timeline of the exhibition’s meeting. For example the video set up Lover (2022) was joined by a second video wall of the identical measurement, located in a mirror place to the unique video. Each movies examine the physique as a vessel from an erotic and clinical-naturalistic standpoint: the trade of fluids within the cropped scenes of pornographic movies within the first, and within the second, the pure pollination cycle of a flower by a bee, and the dripping of plasmapheresis PVC pipe in a medical laboratory. These are two parallel souls however unbiased works, synchronized with the identical soundtrack type, lento-violento. I discovered this selection really highly effective. What pursuits me isn’t the method of subtraction, however of addition—how the brand new parts construct upon the unique, making a layered and evolving narrative. Are you able to inform me extra? I noticed it within the night, if that makes a distinction.
SHAHRYAR
Didn’t we agree we wouldn’t speak about “Daddy” Thek? Now that you just’ve introduced him up, let him be the elephant within the room till I reply your query. Sure, I made the Lover video in 2022. I needed to work from current footage—in that case, a number of seconds of an OnlyFans clip from @DiscoDick’s account, a self-described “hung, vers, kinky homosexual in NYC”—and remodel it via repetition, gradual reframing, and digital results. Nonetheless, I later realized that what really me was revealing the rawness of a easy, intimate gesture: the trade of saliva from one intercourse employee’s mouth to a different’s. Not simply the erotic act, but in addition the truth that this saliva bodily enters the opposite particular person’s physique. Therefore the second half, which is actually a POV of the saliva via the digestive tract. (Though placing it into phrases removes a few of its poetics.)
Now then. When Gioia and I made a decision to point out this work in Rome, I instantly knew it was an event to do an train I had by no means completed earlier than: create a response video that might run concurrently with Lover, sharing soundtrack and length. It got here from a realization I usually have: some issues seem to me solely after a piece is completed, and a part of me needs the piece may nonetheless take in these late-emerging concepts. As an alternative I manifested it as an appendix, or a set of real-time visible footnotes. I invited Antoine Idier, a political scientist and artwork theorist, to assist broaden the theoretical and political dimensions of Lover. We spoke concerning the social significations of saliva, physique fluids in Catholicism, Michel Journiac’s work, how blood in a homosexual context continues to be so deeply tied to AIDS, and Marcel Proust’s analogy between pollinating bees and homosexual intercourse. These convos sparked concepts for photos that broadened the studying of Lover, which stays in and of itself a portrait of that saliva trade.
ALESSANDRO
You’ve sublimated flesh, the relationships between our bodies and their exchanges, in addition to the narrative and characterization of your works right into a system of “alter egos” inside your apply, the place Thek emerges as a transparent but elegantly assimilated reference. And sure, I’m a hustler too, so I’m hustling you again into Thek now, LOL 😀
SHAHRYAR
Sure, sure, Thek. It’s true we share a typical love for him. I see him as an antiestablishment determine who created work that was each deeply private and political. Don’t get me fallacious, he was a hustler and really profession pushed regardless of his outsider standing. However he wasn’t afraid to go wherever his apply led him. Bruce Hainley lately confirmed me work Thek did within the later years of his profession. Work of birch bushes. They’re so ghostly in distinction to his visceral Technological Reliquaries (1964–67). You’d by no means assume it was the identical artist. That type of creative freedom is uncommon. Few artists are unafraid to let go of the work they’re identified for. There are others—Elaine Sturtevant, Henrik Olesen, Puppies Puppies—who’ve this high quality too. However Thek? He’s certainly one of my daddies. Making work that I hope would impress him is typically a driving pressure. I don’t take it so far as you do, although. You appear extra obsessed, a lot so that you just’ve made works as if he have been nonetheless alive. That’s one other type of kink, eh? What do you must say for your self?
ALESSANDRO
Thek and different antiestablishment artists of his era are the elephant within the room for a inventive and financial system that is still “insecure,” nonetheless rooted in parameters like synthesis and familiarity with the current. To me, the mix of Thek’s decaying and hyperrealistic varieties, his methodological queerness, and his relationship with time as a looming risk was a revelation. I started to see so many current works—particularly my very own—as deeply appropriative of his apply, notably on a proper degree. The elephant had was a mammoth—no, a dinosaur.
At that time, my kink for Thek grew to become a self-imposed sentence. After years of learning his work and poetics, I felt the necessity to step apart—to really perceive what I used to be doing and keep away from returning to the first-person singular with out first giving one thing again to him. Regardless that I spotted it late, this grew to become one of many the reason why the dysfunction of creative language—which fascinates me probably the most—exists. I requested myself: Why not hack artwork historical past itself? Why not lengthen the lifetime of an artist who prophesied his personal dying so many occasions, in search of, in his productive schizophrenia, probably the most fearless type of expressive freedom—or maybe an opportunity at survival in different worlds and thru a number of lives?
That’s why I structured the works in Ghostwriting Paul Thek1 as I did, appearing inside fiction as a ghostwriter and presenting 4 items attributed to Thek throughout completely different years: Br’Er Rabbit (attrib. to Paul Thek [1998?]), Televisione / Collaborazione (attrib. to Paul Thek and Mario Schifano [1969?]), Child Forged (attrib. to Paul Thek [1975?]), and To Wong (attrib. to Paul Thek [2017?]). I hoped that, centuries from now, when this dialog is lengthy forgotten, they may really be attributed to him for actual.
That mentioned, via the “fandom” the place I developed this undertaking, specifically by embodying another person’s work, I used to be capable of higher perceive what it means to be alive at the moment and what it means to trade—not saliva, however reminiscence, throughout years, with somebody I’ve by no means met. It additionally helped me see my physique as one thing that doesn’t have to adapt socially—not whilst probably the most lovely or symmetrical kind, however merely as one thing that exists. Extra importantly, it made me query what it means to be categorised as an artist, what my id is as each an individual and an artist, and whether or not I even need an id. Monsters are what I really like probably the most.
SHAHRYAR
Yeah, you’ve grow to be some type of cannibalistic Gifted Mr. Ripleywith this impersonation. It’s actually fairly unique to assume this manner about one other artist, each as a method of understanding them and as a technique for shaping your personal work. You flip artwork making into an act of possession. Consider the distinction: my saliva is exchanged between two intercourse employees, yours with a lifeless artist. It’s fairly superbly morbid. Oh hello, Need. Hello, Loss of life. And the place do they meet? Within the necessity of trade between two people.
ALESSANDRO
I completely agree. Perhaps they meet in an equally lovely and morbid movie, kind of like this: Loss of life and Need, two shut associates who attend a celebration. They enter a phenomenal home with glass home windows in each wall. Different visitors see them on the door and start to cry, not sure if it’s from worry or pleasure. The chums cry for each causes concurrently, so intensely that their tears flood the lounge, lifting and enveloping all of the get together visitors. On the terrace, three folks—one drunk (the lover), one excessive (the boyfriend), and one sober (the hustler)—watch as the home transforms into an aquarium.
SHAHRYAR
Interval. Mic drop.
Shahryar Nashat is a visible artist. He has had solo reveals at MASI Lugano, Switzerland; the Artwork Institute of Chicago; the Renaissance Society (with Bruce Hainley), Chicago; the Museum of Fashionable Artwork; Swiss Institute, New York; and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. He reveals with Sylvia Kouvali, Gladstone Gallery, and David Kordansky Gallery. Nashat creates movies and sculptures that examine the physique and its picture as websites of want, fragmentation, tenderness, and resilience. He treats digital and analog applied sciences—from LEDs to stone to forged resin—as prostheses, props, or stand-ins.
Alessandro Di Pietro is a visible artist who lives and works in Milan. His work has been exhibited on the Watermill Heart, New York; CAN – Centre d’Artwork Neuchâtel; Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and Zazà Gallery, Milan. His works are within the collections of the MADRE, Naples, and MAMBO, Bologna. Di Pietro’s apply explores monstrosity and artwork historical past as open, un-objective formulation during which creative references blur with biographical ones via speculative fiction, sculpture, movie, and installations. Ghostwriting Paul Thek, a undertaking born in 2017 on the American Academy in Rome, presents “unpublished works” attributed to the US artist; an eponymous e-book was revealed with Mousse in 2024.
