04.10 – 09.11-2014

opening on saturday the 4th of October ~ 6 to 9 pm ~

RONGWRONG

Binnenbantammerstraat n.2

1011 CK Amsterdam

The title of this exhibition refers to the ember of a friendship, the one between two women called Amalia and Emilia.  While living around Milan in the 70s they attended ‘La Scuola delle 150 ore’, an education program of arts and science for workers and housewives, where they engaged in a series of writing exercises. Emilia had a strong urge to tell the story of her ordinary life, yet she couldn’t express herself in linear articulated language. It was Amalia, who being confronted with the multiple attempts of her friend decided to write down Emilia’s life as a gift to her.  Emilia would then carry ‘her’ biography in her handbag and ‘read it again and again’. The small narration written by Amalia is at once hers as it is Emilia’s.
It is between these empathic oscillations of the self and the other that the works of Alex Martinis Roe operate. Like a quantum physicist, the artist looks into the short-lived entities that come in and out of existence so quickly that they are not clearly detected by history. It is perhaps inevitable that feminist readings and stories stand at the core of Martinis Roe’s interest. It is the human encounters, the conversations, the empathic entrustments and the lapses of language that she is interested in.
In her work Alex Martinis Roe enters the history of art and of thought as a house where a family of characters from different temporalities and different geographies meet each other at unexpected and performative moments. An older painting, a letter, a conversation that happened between two persons in a bookshop, come into life as their indeterminate existence is projected in the future.

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