Artists Gina Folly
Date 06.10.2023 -08.12.2023
Curator Inès Goldbach
Venue Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland
All images Courtesy of the artist and Courtesy Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva. Photo: Sandra Pointet
The objects chosen by Folly question our condition as human beings, catapulted into an often hostile and coercive society. She endeavours to highlight the intrinsic contradictions, the underlying and imperceptible violence, lurking in all the signs of power that flood the social and political space, and parasitise our lives.
Folly chooses a variety of seemingly banal objects, such as boxes, electrical circuits, chains, padlocks, light bulbs, fans, handles and locks, eyelets and pregnancy tests. She extracts them from their context, transforms or duplicates them, slightly modifying the materials, formats, colours or finish, and recombines them with other objects, accentuating the feeling of constraint, hindrance and confinement.
As part of her exhibition project at the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Gina Folly will be producing an edition, a series of bouquets of preserved flowers presented in cardboard boxes coated with a varnish that protects against humidity and makes the boxes shiny. Each box bears an inscription, a very short phrase found randomly on a horoscope application that predicts the day ahead: slightly simplistic aphorisms, advice, judgements or trivial, absurd prophecies, whose meaninglessness and naivety create a poetic or downright comedic effect.
The process of preserving the flowers in this edition consisted of replacing the sap with glycerine, so that the plant retains a living appearance for many years, without the need for any special care. Once the bouquet has been preserved, no external intervention is required to ensure that the plants retain their original freshness. They are protected from wilting, frozen in a state of almost eternal flowering, but their colour is transformed: the petals take on a light grey-pink tint, almost black and white. A light, subtle, refined metaphor for the passage from life to art.
Gina Folly’s second project for her exhibition at the CEC will feature a frame containing a single sachet of seeds from the “Dolce Vita” flower mix – a reference to the title of the exhibition. The name of the mixture and the brand of these seeds, SELECT, allows Folly to intuitively and emotionally put this existential and philosophical question into perspective. What determines our choices, be they individual or collective? How does this infinite multitude of choices – from belief in chance, to the notion of the preconditioned unconscious, from chaos to consciousness and freedom of choice – influence our paths and our lives?
