Olympia Scarry. White Noise

With contributions by Allora & Calzadilla and Stephen O’Malley
From January 18th to March 6th 2022


Fondazione ICA Milano is happy to present, on the ground floor of its main building, the exhibition White Noise, Olympia Scarry’s (1983) solo show. On this occasion, the show creates a space where Scarry's sculptural works are in dialogue with the film Breaking Into Trunks by the artist duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla as well as with the sound composition “Avaeken” by the Seattle based musician Stephen O’Malley, which will be performed in the next months.

Olympia Scarry (1983) is a Swiss American artist whose fascination with materiality is the constant driving force in her work. Her choices reflect the ambiguities of power as they are transferred through thought and substance.
For "White Noise", Scarry produced a new corpus of sculptural works that capture traces of time and sound impressed in synthesized organic matter. Scarry’s work reverberates through materiality deconstructing architectural forms and recontextualizing them, pushing the material to transform into other. On this specific occasion, the sculptural works by Scarry are put in relation with Allora & Calzadilla’s and Stephen O'Malley’s artistic practices.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, artists’ duo based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, present the video Breaking Into Trunks, which takes the form of a meditation on the interior orders of the universe. From the hunt for the resonant ‘Stradivarious Violin’ trees to the search for the mysterious Higgs Boson particle in nearby Cern and the tally stick system used by local farmers, the film traces a path of order and disorder, beauty and chaos as it might be staged within the humble confines of a local barn.

During the exhibition, Stephen O’Malley will present his composition entitled “Avaeken”, on this occasion performed by Belgian electric guitar ensemble ZWERM. The composition is named after the millennium-plus-old oak on the island of Faro in Gotland, Sweden. Throughout the twenty minutes of the performance, forms of rhythm and structure will move around the space, exciting the air and bodies present in a deeply present and physical way.
The performance’s date will be shared as soon as possible; the event will take place in full compliance with the international anti-contagion norms.