Regeneration
Rome and its ruins have long provoked an aestheticization of decay—a meditation on the frailty of the physical world and the inevitable passage of time. Regeneration gathers the work of contemporary artists working across the globe to consider this paradigm with fresh eyes and push up against a paradox: that decay can seed a new, often beautiful materiality, whether of dust, rust, fragments, or weeds. Not far beyond these aesthetic matters lie ethical ones, concerning permanence and transmutation: how we conceive of and value change, and the struggles in choosing what to keep and what to let go.
The artists presented in Regeneration represent five continents: Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe. They work across scales of time that are equally expansive, from the geologic—the pace at which the earth itself is degrading—to the momentary, a tempo we can register with our eyes and ears. The decline they trace is in some cases sociopolitical, in others environmental, and in others a simple fact of nature and materiality.
The exhibition features Fabio Barile, Chiara Camoni, Annalisa Metta (2017 Italian Fellow) and Luca Catalano, Sonya Clark (2017 Affiliated Fellow), Binh Danh, William Dougherty (2021 Fellow), Guillermo Kuitca (2022 Resident), Jorge Otero-Pailos (2022 Resident), Robert Gerard Pietrusko (2021 Fellow), Georges Senga, Julia Solis, and Yeesookyung.