Daniella Isamit Morales : No Title, No Author

Lucie Fontaine is pleased to present “No Title, No Author” a solo exhibition by Venezuelan-born Milan-based artist Daniella Isamit Morales. This exhibition follows the first presentation of the artist’s practice at Lucie Fontaine’s Stockholm satellite. While in Stockholm Daniella Isamit Morales presented a single long-term project entitled The Monster N° 2 Patrimony for this presentation at Lucie Fontaine’s Milan space the visitors will have the chance to see four artworks which are capturing different researches based on topics like authorship, fiction, signature, identity, disappearance, shifting personality and public persona in relationship to media.

In No Title, No Author (2011-ongoing), which also gives the title to the show, the artist decided to take the identity of another person, which name remains mysterious, substituting her in daily actions like going to school and meeting friends. Through this substitution the artist injected fiction into reality but also generated a double reality, creating an artificial situation in which the same person could be at the same time in two different places. Furthermore this act becomes a subtle critique of how in our reality human relationships can be manipulated and shaped at our convenience. Documenting this act is a printed matter made ‘in collaboration’ – here four hands become two – with the person she substituted.  
 
In Confession of an imaginary orgasm (2010) the artist went to a church in Italy and confessed to a priest a sin she made when she was 9. The sin, related to the artist’s childish attempt to understand what an orgasm meant, came after she read a book on sexual education, which was given to her by her father when she was 9. Underlining the cathartic nature of Daniella Isamit Morales’s practice, as well as her desire to create alternative timelines, this project is presented as a video work: the images were taken by her father during the artist’s first communion which was taken without confessing the sin; the audio is the recording of her confessing the infamous sin.
 
Striscia la Notizia 01/10/10 (2010) is part of the aforementioned project The Monster N° 2 Patrimony. In 2008 the artist started to post flyers around Milan offering money to men if they would allow her to beat them. The flyer attracted the attention of an Italian journalist who contacted the artist and made an interview, which was then manipulated and published in Italian tabloid magazines Vero and Visto. The article consequently attracted the attention of the authors of Pomeriggio 5 a talk show broadcasted by Berlusconi’s TV company, which official target consists of old people and housewives. Eventually her appearance on the talk show generated another “media presence” in the famous Italian TV show called Striscia la Notizia, which is a parody of the week’s news and was one of the first examples of “Italian entertainment TV” brought to Italy by Berlusconi in the 80s. In Striscia la Notizia the artist is ranked “monster number two” in a top ten of media freaks, and this is the reason behind the title of the work The Monster N° 2 Patrimony, which was entirely presented in Sweden.
 
In this work the artist is underlining the end of the division between public and private space as well as testing the re-contextualization and de-contextualization of artistic action. Furthermore this “media domino effect” highlights the sickness of the Italian media apparatus clarifying the state of a country which cultural identity is definitely in danger. Confirming the situation are the emails addressed to the artist by S&M, men willing to be beaten for free or asking to instead beat their mother, as well as the fact that the talk show Pomeriggio 5 was watched by many of the artist’s friends, acquaintances and schoolmates, underlining the cross-generational degeneration of Italian society.  
 
Daniella Isamit Morales was born in Caracas in 1982. She lives and works in Milan.  
 
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