Costanza Candeloro.
Kitten HD & Kitten Lo-fi, 2022
10’26’’, Video

June 1st , 2022 - January 7th, 2023

Costanza Candeloro (Bologna, 1990) is the artist invited to the second appointment of ICA Committed, online platform launched in June 2021 by Fondazione ICA Milano aiming to reflect on the role of the museum in the contemporary digital era through new works and productions. Selected in October 2021 on the occasion of the project Level 0, a format conceived by ArtVerona that invites a number of Italian institutions to identify an artist on display at the fair and to promote her/his work within their cultural program, on the occasion of ICA Committed Costanza Candeloro presents a new production, the video Kitten HD & Kitten Lo-fi (2022).

The work, created in collaboration with a group of filmmakers, represents a composition of “kittens” in very high and very low quality. The artist's use of such a formal mechanism as well as of certain visual patterns is designed to generate a high degree of emotional engagement and immersion. Within a reflection centered on our media landscape, the video evokes contents and images that have gone viral due to their dissemination on digital platforms and social media, channels through which videos of cats, dogs and other animals are commonly conveyed. High and low definition are used, to an increasing extent, with the purpose of gaining the viewer's immediate attention. However, the widespread empathy felt for these animals - commonly associated with the concept of "cute" - is directed toward a reflection on sadness and disillusionment thanks to the text, written by the artist, that runs across the screen accompanying the images along with a rarefied soundtrack.

The work is part of a broader reflection developed by the artist focusing on the analysis of viral contents present in the everyday life of our hyper-digitized society. These, now capable of determine change in our daily practices, expand to the point of exerting control over body and mind and to the point of elaborating linguistic forms that indicate a cultural both semantic and gestural rewriting.

Starting with the work Kitten HD & Kitten Low Fi and the themes it introduces, Fondazione ICA Milano will present in September the artist's first institutional solo exhibition within its project room. The exhibition continues the reflection developed by Candeloro on how viral images contribute to producing dominant meanings and values and on how the vocabulary and syntax they use become a cultural statement; a real language.


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Costanza Candeloro (Bologna, 1990) graduated at Haute école d'art et de design di Ginevra (HEAD). In 2022 she participated in Stages of Adulthood at Sittenwerk, St. Gallen, and was among the twelve artists involved to inaugurate the project RETROFUTURO - at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, MACRO. The artist has also participated in Devoured Spaces at Tunnel Tunnel in Lausanne (2021), STATE OF MIND at the Swiss Institute in Milan (2020), H or Audience at FRI ART, Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020), Dépendance de l'Air at Riverside, Bern (2019), Ehi, Voi! the section of the 16th Quadriennale D'arte di Roma curated by Michele D'Aurizio (2016), Le Leggi dell'Ospitalità, P420, Bologna (2014) and Pocari Sweat at Truth And Consequences, Geneva (2014). In 2020 she realized the online project "Life-Edit" for Fondazione Prada, Milan. Candeloro is one of the finalists of PART - Premio Artisti Italiani 2022, an initiative promoted by Fondazione San Patrignano and the Municipality of Rimini. In 2021, she was selected for the fourth edition of the Club Gamec Prize, curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini. Candeloro is part of the Idioletta and Licit Illicit Bookshop projects. In the second half of 2022 she will present her solo exhibition at ICA Milano, Milan. Costanza Candeloro works between Italy and Switzerland.