Ángeles y Sirenas

With the title of her first exhibition in Berlin, Ángeles y Sirenas, Isidora Gilardi opens a framework that points to the mythological, to the spiritual, to invite us into her ephemeral spatial installation of the same name – on the ground floor of RL16 – to encounter swimming fish and corals as well as birds perched far above on branches, to contemplate their form from different perspectives, more or less life-size. The animals were captured by Isidora Gilardi on black-and-white photographs, using an analog Mamiya medium-format camera, at the Zoo and at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main, where the artist, who was born in Santiago de Chile in 1992 and currently lives in Berlin, completed her studies at the Städelschule last year. Like ambassadors or mediators from another world and time, minerals and fossils hanging from above in the room also invite us to imagine. Several eye-agate pairs fixed on the wall at slightly varying eye heights enable an optical dialogue: Looking, looking into them, looking into history? Where are we now? Where are we here? And what is the relationship between the exhibits, their protagonists? What does the constellation devised by the artist mean? In which sphere, according to which logic do (did) the animals live – among them also a fossilized crab –, how and when did the artifacts with which we share space came into being? What narratives do they bring with them, what images, what associations, what affects do they trigger, these representatives from other habitats – here on site in the exhibition space? White points of light wandering across the walls add to the heightened perception. Are they traces of angels? And what part do we play?