Exhibition: Martina Zanin – Please, Don’t Ever Come Down

Opening: 5.09.2023, 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 6.09. – 30.09.2023

 

There are human beings, such as my father, who are as untamable as hawks.
 And, just as hawks, see the others as prey to attack, without being able to form relationships.
 Loners. Individuals who hurt other people who are more like rabbits or hares.

Martina Zanin

Starting from the autobiographical experience, in Please, Don’t Ever Come Down, Zanin explores the father-daughter relationship through the metaphor of the falcon with its prey. It is a poetic tale of legacies, evolutions, and metamorphosis that delves into blood and familial bonds, dreamlike and imaginary connections and the relationship between man and animal.

In a blend of poetic and scientific elements, private and public, present and past, the artist communicates with the absent father by projecting his figure into the animal world. The falcon is a creature that instills both terror and fascination. The symbolic parallel aims to define a personality that is not only aggressive, but also solitary and aloof. Unruly and impossible to tame, falcons appear and disappear at their own will. Zanin reflects on how even forms of abandonment are assertions of power. The prey becomes a victim of this presence-absence that haunts it, much like the familial baggage we carry, the patterns and dynamics that are difficult to break free from.

Employing a multidisciplinary approach involving photography, archival family images, writing, audio, video and sculpture, the artist develops the metaphorical correspondence between the paternal figure and that of the falcon, tackling themes of aggression, psychological violence, power and control dynamics within family bonds. It urges us to ponder how encounters with animals are always, in some way, encounters with ourselves.