Promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute of Beirut in collaboration with the Beirut Art Center, Electric Whispers, an exhibition by Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975), a visual artist who works with various media such as video, film, photography, and 3D animation, will open on June 24th.
“The works on display reflect significant stages in the artist’s research: multidisciplinary installations and photographs where images and music engage in dialogue with 3D animations, alongside two works specifically created during her recent residency in Beirut.
In the animation Kant Can’t (2024–2025), created using 3D gaming software, the size differences between the astronauts fleeing from giant insects and the oversized hands and feet trying to crush them amplify the sense of loss of the human dimension. The virtual space voyage through codes and algorithms has erased all forecasts of the future and any possible form of knowledge.
In the two-channel installation Afterall (2019), placed at the center of the exhibition, the inhabitants of a not-yet-invented planet – wanderers of the future, small deities lost in real and digital environments – are attuned to a soundtrack made of noises, chants, choirs, whispers, nature’s rhythms, and radio frequencies that briefly harmonize before recombining into dissonant soundscapes. For the artist, developing a philosophy of the present requires a rethinking of reality, in which identity, having become porous, evades the boundaries between artistic genres. Thus, in the video installation Poor, Poor, Jerry (2017), the popular cartoon character (inspired by Tom & Jerry) wanders through the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, repeating in sync fragments of romantic film dialogues drawn from popular cinema. The artist questions the possibility of generating meaning in an era defined by the visual standardization produced by postmodern digital technology and artificial intelligence. Also, the broken statue lying in a clearing, missing its legs and one arm – in the video L’eccezione (2019) – comes to life and makes small movements, propelled by the love theme from the Flashdance soundtrack, a symbol of the 1980s. Whereas in the past audiences were absorbed by the narrative and visual space of moving images, today the virtual interferes with perception, altering reality and thus the aesthetic experience.
Rä di Martino’s interest in virtual worlds resonates with those who argue that “technologies allow us to temporarily and vicariously be something different from who we are and how we live in our daily lives, and that within virtual worlds, it is also possible to stimulate questions and reflections of a philosophical and existential nature, whose value is economic but also social and therefore political.”[1]
During her residency in Beirut, the artist created the installation The Focus of Attention (Up!), consisting of the projection of two slides from her personal archive. The first, in black and white, is based on a reworked archive photo of a theater performance where a group of people looks upward toward the sky, where something is happening, creating an atmosphere of expectation and wonder. The second image shows pages from a 1950s science fiction book featuring a large UFO.
Electric Whispers was developed from a photograph taken in a video game arcade in Tripoli, where the artist explores the influence and role of video games in the daily lives of younger generations. This theme marks the beginning of a new project, also featured in her upcoming fiction film, which will be partly shot in Lebanon. In the deserted room, we glimpse the figure of a child sitting with his back turned, to whom the vast, open world of video games offers a unique opportunity to construct identity and imaginary space-time dimensions. The digitization of the photograph transforms the room into infinitely moldable material, broken down into geometric solids in an exercise of optical-perceptual alterations.
“Digital technology and the time spent in front of screens have completely disrupted our relationship with culture. We are all refugees from different fields, replicants inhabited by fragments of text, characters in a script journeying through hyperspace.”[2]
Finally, Rä di Martino presents an installation using UV light and three black-and-white photographs from her Open Trees series (2012–ongoing), to which she has added a new image reworked from a 1908 archive photo of a landscape in Sidon (Ṣaydā). This work, which evokes traditional photographic techniques as a form of historical recollection—even when manipulated—denies the notion of an absolute or dominant truth.
In response to today’s disorientation, insecurity, and the fragility of technological systems, Rä di Martino chooses to establish connections with other worlds, projecting herself toward new models of understanding and interpreting reality, in line with an approach based on anticipation and experimentation—not descriptive, but a dislocation of imagination, where memories can still generate original thoughts and visions.
The works in this exhibition invite viewers to reclaim a possible horizon, going beyond the formal specificities of the various media to inaugurate a new reading and function of technology.”
Maria Rosa Sossai
Curator
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[1] Stefano Gualeni, Il videogioco del mondo. Istruzioni per l’uso, Timeo, 2024.
[2] Les Inrockuptibles, interview with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, no. 41, June 2025.
BIOGRAPHIES
Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975) studied in London, where she earned an MFA from the Slade School of Art. She won the New York Prize, which granted her a fellowship at Columbia University, where she lived for five years before returning to Italy. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and film festivals including: MoMA-PS1 and Artists Space in New York; Tate Modern, London; MCA, Chicago; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Museion, Bolzano; Magasin, Grenoble; the Busan Biennale; Manifesta 7; Kino der Kunst, Munich; and Transmediale, Berlin. At the Venice International Film Festival, she presented the medium-length film The Show MAS Go On in 2014, winning the Gillo Pontecorvo Award, the SIAE Award, and a Silver Ribbon (Nastro d’Argento). In 2018, she presented her first feature film, Controfigura. In 2019, she inaugurated the exhibition Afterall at the Mattatoio – Palaexpo in Rome and at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. In 2022, she held a retrospective at Forte Belvedere in Florence, and a solo show at Torre Matta in Otranto, featuring an installation on the archive of Carmelo Bene. In 2023/2024, she developed the Kant Can’t project, supported by the PAC (Plan for Contemporary Art), shown at the Polo Museale in Potenza and currently on view at the Fondazione Giuliani in Rome. She is currently working on her second feature film, produced between Italy, France, and Lebanon.
Maria Rosa Sossai is a researcher in participatory artistic practices, educational policies, and artist video and film. Since 2021, she has been Scientific Director of the Participatory Projects Department at the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (PA). In 2018, she co-founded fuoriregistro: notebook of pedagogy and contemporary art, Boîte edizioni, Lissone. From 2012 to 2022, she directed the Accademia Libera delle Arti, www.alagroup.org, an independent platform for education and contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions and projects in museums, Italian Cultural Institutes, foundations, and galleries in Italy and abroad, including: Matera European Capital of Culture 2019 for the M.E.M.O.RI. Museum; MAN Museum in Nuoro; Nomas Foundation; the American Academy and the Real Academia de España in Rome; Villa Panza, Varese; Tel Aviv Museum; SongEun ArtSpace in Seoul; and the IIC in Barcelona. She has been a visiting critic for the MFA Program at Parsons Fine Arts, New York. She has authored numerous essays and articles in Italian and international contemporary art catalogues and journals. Her publications include: Vivere insieme l’arte come azione educativa (Torri del vento, Palermo, 2017); Arte video: storie e culture del video d’artista in Italia (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2002); Film d’artista: percorsi e confronti tra arte e cinema (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2009).
