Sydney, Katthy Cavaliere’s Sedia Rossa exhibition

The Italian Cultural Institute in Sydney presents the exhibition Sedia Rossa (Red Chair) featuring artworks and archive videos by Italian-born Australian artist Katthy Cavaliere (1972-2012).

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, artist, curator, art critic and lecturer at the National Art School in Sydney, the exhibition includes three archive videos by the artist: 6 Years (1978; a Super 8 film depicting a scene from her childhood birthday party); Milano (2002; a video diary made during an art residency in Milan); and Sedia Rossa (2002; a touching video diary documenting her artistic and romantic connections during her stay in Milan).

Katthy Cavaliere was active in Sydney from the mid-1990s until shortly before her untimely death in 2012. Her creative project consisted of turning personal objects into art. Using photos, videos, drawings, performances and installations, Katthy Cavaliere made sense of her place in the world through a diary self-analysis that was an integral part of her artistic process. Sedia Rossa combines photos and videos with never-before-exhibited family archive material, from her childhood in 1976 to one of her last works, Nest (2010), made two years before her death.

The motif of the chair, a recurring metaphor in Katthy Cavaliere's work, is the glue of the works selected for this exhibition. For the artist, the chair was a symbol of solitude, isolation and suspension of time to allow intimate reveries and personal rituals. In her most emblematic work, Suspended Moment (2000), a luminous toy chair floats in a black void, hinting at what can be made visible and invisible.

Photo credits: Katthy Cavaliere, loved, 2008. Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the Artist's Estate.