I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don't actually ever lie.

(Lucia Berlin)

Cassina Projects is pleased to announce Tightrope, a group exhibition featuring works by Nour El Saleh, Ndidi Emefiele, Alessandro Fogo, Cecilia Granara, Erna Mist, Tsai-Ling Tseng.

Outside world and inner world dovetail as the works on display delve into the meanderings of human experience laying bare the collapsing of standard binaries of real and fictional.

Foundational notions like belonging and selfhood have been shaken by a prolonged liminal experience of spatial alienation and temporal warp. Limbo is the new dimension where identity and subjectivity are recast. Here, traditional frameworks blur and erratic narratives construe pliable realities.

Toying with ambiguous or missing contexts and with the uncanny, Tightrope disputes the actual existence of what constitutes categorical truth as the works on show mediate vaguely familiar visual lexicons imbued with the alchemical constructs of imagination. Arching from the cryptic to the decadent and from the intimate to the cosmic, the works dig up the oppositional tension between interiority and exteriority, living and inanimate, agency and predetermination, which define our deeply illusory understanding of the reality around us.

In the performative oscillation between looking and being looked at, sensorial experience and existential questioning criss-cross. Exploring the intersection of cognition and intuition, Tightrope enacts a transcending play where the subconscious is simultaneously stage set, lead character and negotiator of meaning.