Monia Ben Hamouda
Michele Gabriele
May - June 2022

Monia Ben Hamouda: Wudu Diorama
Michele Gabriele: About defining boundaries and other things

For its ninth hosted residency project, lower_cavity is pleased to present two large-scale installations by Milan-based artists Monia Ben Hamouda and Michele Gabriele. Partners with separate visual art practices who regularly work alongside each other, Ben Hamouda and Gabriele have spent their time developing new work in response to lower_cavity’s cavernous post-industrial space and the surrounding environs of western Massachusetts. Conceived and realized over the course of a six-week stay, the two projects speak to and across each other, finding the valences between each artist’s practice.

For Gabriele, the sensibilities of speculative and dystopian fiction operate as a framework through which an unruly materiality labors to articulate itself. His work embodies a post-human, post-technologic iteration of the Grotesque, wherein all forms of matter—organic and synthetic; animate and inanimate—commingle in a journey towards a chaotic equilibrium, an entropic sublime in which hierarchies of every sort merge and dissolve. Underlying these concerns is a more epistemological preoccupation with the unreliable gulfs that lie between perceiver and perceived, between viewer and artwork, between ideation and realization. Refracting a techno-positivist view of the future through a lens of disillusionment, his works flourish among the ruins of doomed utopian visions; fugitive elements of self-generated forms called forth by their own sense of inadequacy. Situated in a huge, vault-like sub-level of lower_cavity, his installation About defining boundaries and other things is inspired by a mental picture of a shy student copying historic paintings in a museum—an image Gabriele says came into his mind when he first entered the space. The installation consists of a trio of sculptures: shaggy and sinuous tendril-like entities laboriously inscribing fragments of imagery onto copper scrolls. Inhabitants of a world in which any notion of the human seems a vague and distant memory, these creations pass the time engaged in a quixotic contemplation of their hybridized nature.

 Born into a Muslim community as the daughter of an Islamic calligrapher, Ben Hamouda navigates distances between complex histories–of art, culture, language, and religion–reconciling these polarities through a personal poetics articulated through a syntax of gesture and raw materiality. Following a belief that every individual is inextricably connected to the psychological universe of their ancestors, Ben Hamouda attempts to master her influences against the backdrop of a contemporary, continually shifting landscape. She confronts her generational heritage through what she describes as a shamanic process, creating works that act as gestural exorcisms of expectations imposed on her by both tradition and a politicized present. Her visual language, which employs a broad range of formal approaches, is steeped in cultural and religious symbology that applies pressure to Muslim culture’s injunction against figurative representation. Her materials—raw steel, salvaged wood, powdered North African spices, charcoal—serve as conduits through which she channels the divergent forces that have shaped her; talismanic performers in a ritual that manifests the struggle between the strictures of tradition and an urge to self-expression. Working with massive wooden beams used in the original construction of the former mill building housing lower_cavity, Ben Hamouda has created a 40-foot-long sculptural construction, Wudu Diorama, that considers linkages between ruined architecture and physical and spiritual protection. Atmospheric haze effects and several kilograms’ worth of powdered spices add layers of visual and olfactory complexity to the installation. A complementary work, It’s a Windy Day in Tataouine III (Hammam door), acts as a gestural intervention within obsolete remnants of the building’s original infrastructure.

Following the conclusion of their residency, Ben Hamouda and Gabriele will be presenting a two-person exhibition—their first in the US—at ASHES/ASHES in New York City. The exhibition, co-organized by Ashes/Ashes and lower_cavity, will open on July 1st and run through August 14th, with an opening reception on July 1st from 6 - 8 pm. ASHES/ASHES is located at 56 Eldridge Street, New York, NY.

Monia Ben Hamouda (b. 1991; Milan, Italy) lives and works between al-Qayrawan and Milan. Her work has been presented in various venues such ChertLüdde, Berlin; Jevouspropose, Zurich; ArtBasel, Basel; Ariel Feminisms in the Aesthetics, Copenhagen; MiArt, Milan; Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, Florence; Et al., San Francisco; Ada, Rome; Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris; Universitätssammlungen Kunst, Dresden; Alios 16me Biennale d’Art Contemporain, La Teste de Buch; Marselleria Permanent Exhibition, Milan. Awards include Torino Social Impact Art Award x Artissima; Art Business Accelerator Grant – Artwork Archive and Redline Contemporary Art Center; DUCATO Contemporary Art Prize.

Michele Gabriele (b. 1983; Fondi, Italy) lives and works in Milan. His work has been presented at: NAM, Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence; Anno Domini, New York; 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Studio E1, Paris; Alios 16ème Biennale d’Art Contemporain, La Teste-de-Buch; Gossamer Fog, London; Buropolis, Marseille; Konstanet, Kunstihoone Art All, Tallinn; Nevven, Göteborg; Fondazione Pini, Milan; Et al., San Francisco; Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon; Fondazione Spinola Banna, Turin; Marselleria Permanent Exhibition, Milan; Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza.