Category: reviews

by Taylor Bielecki

He Spoke To The Birds, a group exhibition curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan at the AAIE Center for Contemporary Art in Rome, is a journey into intricacies, interactions, and lingering conversations. Featuring Jeremias Rumpl, Diego Azzola, and Huang Zhe, the exhibition brings together practices with such disparate registers that, at first glance, they might seem incompatible. Yet curator Fan has woven them together skilfully, allowing each voice to be heard while the collective voice resonates just as strongly.

In Huang Zhe’s The Thinking of a Small Cluster of White Plants (2026), Fan introduces terms such as corroding, remembering, drifting, and dissolving. Words that feel light, airy, and weightless, yet suggest flow, connection, growth, and a steady presence through change. Each starts with an object, an element of nature, or a memory; through these actions, its point of departure shifts, much as the histories surrounding us do.

Standing in the midst of Rome’s everlasting history, this exhibition adds to its deep and ever-growing presence. Many works extend beyond themselves, allowing forms to grow while their lines still connect. A striking example that made an impact on me is Diego Azzola’s works, whose galvanized pipes emerge from his paintings as physical extensions of the image. In their original function, pipes carry water from one place to another; here, they do the same, linking works to the gallery and neighboring pieces. Rome has long been expanding and intertwining with new history, and its water systems still exist throughout the city, hidden, underground, lying at its edges, leaving a quiet but lasting imprint. Azzola’s pipes function metaphorically as fragments of a system that never entirely stopped functioning. He seems interested in what happens at the edges, where things cease to carry one singular meaning and instead become more complex and layered.

Fanfan Yuxuan Fan utilizes the space exceptionally well. Hung in clusters, the work develops their own conversations, guiding viewers through the gallery’s interestingly shaped architecture. Drawing on the spirit of Arte Povera, Fan enriches the curatorial framework by allowing the objects and materials to find their own voices — pipes, zinc plates, and smoke becoming not merely media, but interlocutors. This exhibition invites closer attention to details, connections, and intricacies. Interviewing Fan was immensely enlightening, offering insight into the process behind it, from engaging with the space to shaping relationships between works.

TB: What drew you to choose these artists, and how did you work with them to choose the works for this particular space?

FYF: Diego Azzola and Huang Zhe have already built relations with AAlE. During my conversation with the gallery founder, I proposed inviting Jeremias Rumpl, based in Germany, to join. From the outset, I envisioned the project around materiality and the spirit of Arte Povera while remaining grounded in each artist’s practices that treat materials as active participants in the creative process.

TB: What interested AAIE in collaborating with you on the exhibition He Spoke to the Birds, especially in relation to supporting younger curatorial voices and international artists in Rome?

FYF: There was strong alignment from the start. AAlE has never been focused exclusively on or limited to local artists; its programs have always had an international vision and encouraged dialogue across cultural contexts. I was mindful that this exhibition would take place in Rome, a city where Arte Povera was not simply an art-historical reference, but a way of engaging with a history that originated in a living context for rethinking materiality. That shared vision made the collaboration feel natural and meaningful.

TB: How did you consider the exhibition as a space where different forms of time and material presence coexist beyond physical presence? How did you decide on placement and installation heights?

FYF: The AAlE space is very different from a conventional white cube. Its triangular corners and irregular geometry, characteristic of Roman architecture, opened up possibilities that a standard space would not. I grouped Diego’s installations by color and series within one corner, while positioning sculptures of different forms and tones in dialogue with Huang Zhe’s paintings. Throughout, I was thinking about spatial narrative, how to create a sequence that feels coherent while remaining visually engaging and full of unexpected encounters.

TB: Given the deep history of Rome, what kinds of conversations or connections were you hoping might enter the gallery as viewers experience the work?

FYF: Rome made this exhibition possible in a particular way. There is something about a city where history is never abstract, where ancient infrastructure, ruins, and contemporary life coexist, that invites a return to what is most essential. For me, the exhibition also returns to one of the fundamental ideas behind Arte Povera: not a style or historical movement, but an attitude toward the world. He Spoke To The Birds suggests a way of relating to nature and all living things with equality and attentiveness. In today’s uncertain world, I hope it offers a quieter space to reconsider our relationships, with one another, with materials, and with the natural world — to slow down, to listen, and to reconnect with what is most essential.

TB: At what point does the material stop being a surface and become a collaborator? Is the metal seen as an extension of the work? Perhaps acting as a drawn line?

FYF: I think that’s a very apt reading of Diego Azzola’s work. The galvanized pipes are not simply structural elements; they become active collaborators in shaping the composition and the viewer’s movement through space. Extending beyond the pictorial surface, they function like drawn lines that have escaped the canvas and unfolded into three dimensions. They also carry a historical resonance in Rome, deeply embedded in the city’s architectural infrastructure, so when Diego brings them into dialogue with painting, the material responds to the image, the space, and history surrounding it.

TB: The show title evokes a foundational ethos of Arte Povera: a world in which human and non-human exist on the same level. How do you feel this theme fits the works? How does each artist embody this ethos?

FYF: I think each artist embodies this ethos differently, but all approach materials as something with agency. That openness lies at the heart of the spirit of Arte Povera and this exhibition. Jeremias Rumpl relinquishes part of the creative process to acid, weather, and time, allowing the material to shape the final work. Diego Azzola places industrial pipes, painting, and marine forms on equal terms, without hierarchy, dissolving boundaries between the natural, the built, and the imagined. Huang Zhe transforms smoke into a painted presence, allowing memory and atmosphere to emerge through a material that is almost impossible to grasp. None of them impose meaning on their materials; instead, they enter into a dialogue. That willingness to listen, to materials, to time, and to the more-than-human world, is what most deeply connects their practices to Arte Povera and the title He Spoke To The Birds.

TB: Elements within the pieces vary in weight and presence; how did you negotiate those differences while maintaining the coherence of the whole show?

FYF: I didn’t begin by thinking about contrast or balance between materials. Each artist had already developed their own material language: zinc, pipes, and smoke were not choices I imposed, but vocabularies already in motion. What I noticed was that these materials also carried a particular resonance in Rome: a city built on stone, water systems, and accumulated time. The differences in weight and presence emerged naturally from bringing these three practices together. My role was less about negotiation and more about creating the right spatial conditions for each to exist on its own terms, while allowing connections to emerge across the exhibition.

Installation view of He Spoke To The Birds, Rome. Artists: Diego Azzola, Huang Zhe. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of AAIE and FanFlus.

About the Writer:
Taylor Bielecki lives in Gowanus, where her studio is, and works at Pratt Institute, where she earned her MFA. She also studied at Penn State, where she earned a BA in English and a BFA in Fine Arts. She finished as a finalist in the Kennedy Center’s VSA National Emerging Young Artist program for 2017, where she earned an award of Excellence. She has shown prints internationally in a print exchange in Australia and exhibitions in Dubai, India, and the Glasgow School of Art. She has also shown paintings internationally in Gallery 24N, PhilaMOCA’s juried exhibitions in Philadelphia, Pa., Perry Lawson Fine Art in Nyack, NY, BWAC in Red Hook, and IW Gallery in Brooklyn. Taylor works for Two Coats of Paint, TUSSLE Magazine, and has joined Art Spiel as a contributing writer. @Taylor.Bielecki

by Chunbum Park

The Art of Cross-Cultural, Trans-Atlantic Friendship and the Return to Our Magical Mythological Origins, New Paltz, NY

At Villa Isis, a gallery in the woods that also functions as a creative retreat, Lise Ellingsen curates an exhibition of 20+ artists and film directors as a form of cultural exchange and bonding of relations. This cross-cultural event sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General New York and in collaboration with Oscar Galleri from Norway is a trans-Atlantic gesture of friendship between the Nordic countries and the United States. 

Titled, Villa Isis: A Nordic-New York Immersive Art Experience, the exhibition features the works of Jens Lien, Anja Breien, Eva Davidova, Tatiana Florival, Anki King, Avani Patel, Yasmeen Abdallah, Lisa Saeboe, Shayna Strype, Eliza Lu Doyle, Kristin Jacobsen, Karine Ruud, Lise Ellingsen, Avery Syrig, and additional invited artists.

The scope of the exhibition includes works of painting, sculpture, and immersive VR and video projection, which occupy spaces out in the open amongst the foliages and within the interior of the gallery. The works all communicate with one another and inscribe experiences and new thoughts within the viewers in a complex ecosystem and web of ideas and meanings.

Anki King’s Human Nature is a sculptural installation made with branches and vines over armature that merges seamlessly with its natural surroundings. The work reimagines humanity’s DNA in the vegetal form requiring a magical power to transform into it. The vegetal and natural body representing a young woman is neither a prison nor a limitation; it is a type of liberation as if the person is waking up from a dream into the reality of the natural realm. The lack of arms on the figure is a part of the metaphor that captures the essence of existence for the vegetal forms existing in nature. This is just as flowers and trees lack upper appendages and digital manipulators (aka hands with fingers) and must rely purely on communication via pollens and other chemical signals. In the installation, the sculpture is lit with a red light for nighttime viewing and is surrounded by leaves and branches, the boundary to which is indistinguishable from the sculpture’s idea as the self.

Lise Ellingsen’s Auðumbla (2023) is an ambitious sculptural installation involving lights, resin pieces, and a TV screen that illustrate the Nordic mythology of the primeval cow who fed the primordial frost jötunn Ymir milk. It is also said that Auðumbla, which is pronounced as “eidoombla” in English, also licked and dissolved the salty rime rocks to reveal Búri, the grandfather of the gods. In the work, we see the cow extending a giant tongue to lick away at the rock, surrounded by scattered and glowing mushrooms. The digital screen displays a repeating spiral pattern perhaps to visually represent the process and the sensation of touch and taste by the gigantic corpus linguae. This work along with Anki King’s Human Nature and others positions the exhibition as a space for contemporary reinterpretation of and re-engagement with the magical and mythological origins and perception of humanity. This is the aesthetic and symbolic realm and narrative mode that had existed for tens or hundreds of thousands of human existence before the rise of science and technology in the modern era, which shattered those realms.

Kristin Jacobsen, a photographer and gallerist from Oslo, Norway, installs her signature piece titled, SMASH (2026), from the upper height of a tall tree. The installation is made from twenty A2 photographs mounted on aluminum mesh and crumpled like discarded pieces of paper. The aluminum metal furnishes the piece with a sense of permanency and longevity, which the photographs printed on paper would lack. And the photographs imbue the work with internal raw visual materials that add substance and narrative to the ideation and production process by the artist. The work is very much about the process of creativity. Why did the artist use the metaphor of the act of smushing the photographs? Jacobsen appears to reflect on the fact that the process of creativity involves steps of aesthetic and visual selection, in which additions of the ideal and the subtraction of the unideal take place. What works and what doesn’t in the final image or product? This may be a dangerous habit of artists that, when applied to the sociopolitical realm, results in evil policies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan around the time of World War II. The work serves as reversal of this habit and process of selection amongst the artists, in which the artist destroys photographs, whether her own or found, equally and without saving the favorites, as a form of expression and questioning.

Eva Davidova’s AR Dancer with Plants utilizes augmented reality technology on a camera-equipped camera to project a dancing figure of a vegetal humanoid onto a circular grouping of stones. The augmented reality depicts not only a dancer but also the flowers and trees standing by the dancer. Davidova’s piece gives life and agency to the natural surroundings on figurative terms to which humans can relate, serving as a bridge between the human imagination and the natural realm. The work, which is technologically-based, traverses several domains, including the human, the symbolic, the metaphorical, the natural, and the electronic machine. As a result, the installation is a reaction against our word-based thinking and preconceptions that box us into rigid thinking, preset definitions, and binaries of opposition. Davidova’s art turns out to be not just an art or a 3D rendering, but it is a creature and a vegetal life form with a life force that exists within the symbolic and aesthetic realm of not just human but also the imagination of all life in the form of atoms per posthumanist theory and pananimism. 

Villa Isis: A Nordic-New York Immersive Art Experience is a thoughtfully curated exhibition in which the artists’ and curators’ visions interact and engage in a meaningful dialogue for re-imagination and re-examination of our magical and mythological roots. The shifting of boundaries of identity and narratives that cross over multiple realms between the human and nature and the machine allows us to rediscover our potential for spiritual liberation and a means of finding our place in the universe. The exchange between the American and the Nordic artists is an encounter of identities and symbolisms between a locality and a cosmopolitan hybridity (consisting of multicultural origins). 

In this communication and exchange, the Nordic artists who come from a particular region and people in Europe have something to teach to the Americans, who originate from all over the world (because the US is a nation of immigrants). While the progressive arm of the US had been a pioneer of the democratic values of diversity and equality, it is now the Europeans who learned the ideological modes of the Americans and are teaching the Americans in turn about their past morally superior position of democratic values and progressive ideals. This position was prior to the rise of Trumpism and MAGA, which destroyed the American stature as the leader of the free world. While the world is greatly turbulent and changed by the rise of right-wing extremism and strongmen, the exchange across the Atlantic is an important channel for communication between the progressively-minded people. This is because we must engage in this kind of gathering and dialogue in order to reflect on our own purpose and reinvigorate our trajectory… of progress in the pursuit of human rights and dignity, equality, democratic and humanist values… for not only humanity but also Mother Earth.