Olympia Scarry. Microwave Sky
with a film by Raven Chacon

Opening on invitation only: 16-19 April 2024

22 April – 24 November 2024
Calle Seconda dei Orbi (Castello), 5201, Venezia
Access by appointment only
Info and booking office@icamilano.it

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Fondazione ICA Milano presents on the occasion of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia FONDAZIONE ICA MILANO – Casa Venezia, the new nomadic program makes its debut in Venice with an unprecedented site-specific exhibition project by Olympia Scarry and a film by Raven Chacon.

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Fondazione ICA Milano launches a new hosting program for Italian and international artists through which the Milan institution extend its activities beyond its own original venue in Milan, with a calendar of residencies and site-specific projects that will spread throughout Italy.
Fondazione ICA is writing a new chapter of its cultural activity, which comes to life on the occasion of the 60th Interna0onal Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia inside a private home: Casa Venezia. ICA Milano’s site-specific project’s first iteration will offer a place for the public to pause, reflect and converse during the hectic opening days of the Venice Biennale, rediscovering the time for knowledge and exchange. Casa Venezia opens with Microwave Sky by artist Olympia Scarry (1983), a site-specific exhibition project in dialogue with a film by artist and composer Raven Chacon curated by Alberto Salvadori in the spaces of the private home of two exceptional guests, Massimo Adario and Dimitri Borri.

The exhibition will be open to the public by appointment from 22 April to 24 November 2024. For Microwave Sky, the artist Olympia Scarry exhibits for the first time in Venice a new body of works and continues the research inaugurated with her solo exhibition White Noise, which took place in the spaces of Fondazione ICA Milano in 2022, where her works were in dialogue with a film by Allora & Calzadilla & a sound composition by Stephen O’Malley. The artist explores and unhinges the subject of matter and its transformation dealing with the collapse of the natural order, synthetic regeneration and the tension it generates with materiality. With the exhibition project Microwave Sky, Olympia Scarry shapes a landscape dominated by microwave radiation, branching out in the form of infrasound frequencies, collecting records of time’s cycle within interior landscapes.

On show for the occasion is a selection of new productions exhibited on the ground floor spaces of Adario and Borri's home. The sculptures placed in close proximity to the varying tides of the lagoon, in constant flux, create an exceptional stage for Scarry's installations in synch with her evolving work which unfolds in an exploratory process that ranges from matter to sound, from photographic print to scent. Along with the new productions, the artist displays a continuation of the White Noise series. The works capture traces of time and sound impressed in synthesized organic matter. The artificial interventions within the natural elements create an alchemy of stillness which sound and time defy. The minerals crystallized in geological time, or deep time, are transformed within the transparent hints in onyx, while the line drawings carved in the stone disrupt the tempo. While IPD 1 8E - R (2024) captures sounds inaudible to humans with a sophisticated infrasound system radiated to form solidified ash in the form of a loudspeaker, White Noise XX (2024) emerges from white marble partially tempered with a precision cutter and partially eroded by time; with only evidence of a stain of fluorescent UV light. Bird of Paradise (2024) captures on photographic film a displaced bird in a concrete jungle, that was once part of the Mata Atlantica. 10Hz encapsulates, as a liquid sculpture, the scent of a rare plant not yet in existence; now “living” only in its synthetic lab form. White Noise IV, a pink onyx sculpture presented for the first time at the Fondazione ICA in Milan in 2022, is a true capture of the processes of stratification and transformation that time imprints on matter with an intervention disrupting the tempo, even if for just a second.

Microwave Sky sees Olympia Scarry collaborating with Navajo composer, performer and artist Raven Chacon, whose film Report (2001/2015) creates a space where the artists’ practices dialogue together. The film is an ensemble composition that plays firearms of different calibres. Revolvers, shotguns and rifles generate an unexpected euphony, interspersed with carefully calibrated moments of silence following a score composed by Chacon and presented in the form of a booklet placed on its stand.

Microwave Sky, the microwave light that fills all space. When the Universe became transparent to light. The light burns now, as the sun sets.


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Thanks to Massimo Adario, Dimitri Borri and APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia, for their kind support of the exhibition.

Thanks to Intesa Sanpaolo, main sponsor of the Fondazione ICA Milano.

Thanks to illycaffè, technical sponsor of Fondazione ICA Milano - Casa Venezia.

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OLYMPIA SCARRY

Olympia Scarry (b. 1983, Geneva, Switzerland) is a Swiss American artist. Scarry’s fascination “to materiality, its formations, biological roots, alterations, and the shelters in which they might form. Geo-specific iterations of something less defined” is at the core of her work. Scarry diagrams possibility while at the same time withholding the very point of view that such possibility typically provides, at the same time she asks us to look at the what we typically look through. Scarry’s work reverberates through materiality deconstructing architectural forms and recontextualizing them, pushing the material to transform into other. Her works continue an exploration of traces while considering site specificity through the subtleties of time. Her choices reflect the ambiguities of power as they are transferred through thought and substance. Gravity and decay play a role in rendering solid forms, formless, in states of flux; caught as they are between weight and weightlessness and to record the material memory of time. Scarry examines interior landscapes through synthesized organic matter. Scarry’s first solo institutional exhibition was held at Fondazione ICA in Milano in 2022. Among her solo exhibitions there are: Seeing Things As They Ar, Hauser & Wirth in Gstaad (2018), VNH, No House Music, Paris (2018), Parallel Lines Meet At The Point of Infinity, APALAZZOGALLERY (2019), BioSynthetic, Piacentini’s Torrione INA, Brescia (2023), and her most recent solo Sound Travels Faster Under Water at Tarmak in Gstaad (2023). Her first permanent site-specific outdoor installation at Eleven Madison Park in NYC entitled, Eleven/Eleven was commissioned in 2018. She received her BFA from American University in Paris in Social Psychology and her MFA in Studio Art at NYU and Curatorial Studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in NYC. Scarry is co- founder and co-curator of the Swiss Biennale Elevation1049.