In Naples, Paola Risoli's photo exhibition on the life of a Nigerian girl

Until Jan. 14, 2024, Shazar Gallery in Naples presents J LIFE, the second solo exhibition by Paola Risoli (Milan, 1969), an artist who works with installations, photography, video and sculpture, in the spaces of Via Pasquale Scura.

The exhibition is the summa of a large project started in 2016 that offers glimpses of the story of J, a young woman from Lagos, who left Nigeria as a minor, lived in Libya four years, one of which was spent in prison, recognized as a political refugee because she was a victim of trafficking. Her story laden with strength, life, mistakes, is returned by Risoli through a documentation of two thousand seven hundred files, including images and texts, 29 gigs of data, merged in part in the short film LIFELIE (11’13’’; Best Director, Best Photography, Best Editing at the documentary section of the XIII TSN International Short Film Festival, Rome 2020; artistic director: Mimmo Calopresti, jury president: Flavia Perina)

On display are Punches, photographic close-ups of J, accompanied by her annotations and the photographer’s considerations.

However, the images of the woman’s face appear censored by a huge black block that reminds us of the obligation to hide herself as an irregular, an obligation that therefore also invests her visual representation. The same violence of erasure of identity, of rupture of integrity, is translated in the extended blacks, the isolation of the gaze, and the iconically broken body of LIFELIE’s shots, from which the six video frames in the exhibition(Fragments) are derived. Also featured in the gallery are the two videos SHOOTS and START, the official charters of J’s story, and the site-specific installation ASHES/CENERI.

“Paola Risoli’s work, using the practices of relationship and participation, makes us reflect, through the power of the artwork, on the multiple complexities of such an epochal phenomenon as emigration. A phenomenon that, depending on the approach, creates tension and scandal or participation and solidarity, ultimately poses the atavistic question of the relationship with the other. Relationship that, however one looks at it, is at the basis of the constitution of every human society. Migrants in the time of the society of globalization and spectacularization become involuntary protagonists of the media scene even before they constitute a problem of flows and social arrangements.” M. Melotti

The exhibition is accompanied by a critical text by Massimo Melotti.

For all information, you can visit the official website of Shazar Gallery.

Pictured: Paola Risoli, START 3’33’’ (2023) digital video FHD, color, sound + iron box 29 x 21 x 18 cm.

In Naples, Paola Risoli's photo exhibition on the life of a Nigerian girl

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