Salvatore Vitale / Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov

Mostra personale di Salvatore Vitale e di Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov nella project room.

Comunicato stampa

Ncontemporary is pleased to present Salvatore Vitale’s (Italy, 1986) solo show Death by GPS, supported by a text of Zoé Samudzi. The artist returns to the gallery spaces two years after premiering his project Decompressed Prism.

Death by GPS is a series produced with the support of the MAST Foundation in 2023; it gathers videos, photographs, and installations which delve into issues such as labor exploitation, the gig-economy, and automated processes within the context of post-capitalism.

The project primarily focuses on South Africa, specifically the Gauteng region. This location was chosen because historically it has been the center of imperialistic dynamics and labor exploitation due to its vast mining reserves. Today, Gauteng hosts many freelance workers in the IT field who operate for Western companies within the gig-economy system.

Salvatore Vitale analyzes how automation biases shape the relationships between individuals, labor and social structures that generate new forms of exploitation. The project explores the ongoing social and economic shifts influenced by technological developments and draws parallels with the historical exploitation of workers in the mining sector.

For the first time in Milan Ncontemporary presents the works of Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov (Russia, 1988), an interdisciplinary artist based in New York who in recent years has focused his research on themes of personal identity, the relationship of “normalcy” and ecology.

Fedotov-Fedorov has a background in genetic engineering and has long placed at the center of his work a strategy of scientific and museological collection and classification. The protagonists of his works are animal-like figures, images that appear to be inspired by entomological studies, used as a primary element to blur the existing boundary between the human and everything that is “other”.

The characters that live in his works come from childhood memories; for a rare kidney anomaly, the artist has passed most of his childhood in a hospital and was at the centre of clinical demonstrations. This type of experience deeply marked the relationship with his body, bringing him into a bodily dissociation. Also during his youth, the artist, suffered acts of bullying connected with his sexual identity; this violence inextricably marked his vision of life, leading him to turn his look to the animal world.

Fedotov-Fedorov focuses on attempt to disassemble social construct that limits personal identification. The artist is questioning the concept that society force us to see as “normal”, stimulating a lateral vision. His art explores themes such as bodily dissociation, masking and otherness using creature as metaphors for human disconnect.