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Background Noise
Carmela De Falco, Semin Hong, Magdalen Wong, Orsola Zane
Curated by Giulia Pollicita and Clara Rodorigo

Opening Reception: November 28th 6 - 8 pm
Performance by Carmela De Falco “reflecting, reflecting, the voice” with special guests singers Ilenia Cipollari and Serena Braida





DES BAINS
20 Great Portland Street
London W1W 8QR
info@desbains.co.uk




I often find myself eavesdropping on other people’s chats when sitting alone outside at bars, on the street where youngsters gather, waiting for a friend at the restaurant. I often find myself living out to the soundtrack of what would otherwise be lost in the background and fancy living other people’s lives, knowing what they think, what they do, what they want. It’s not that I want to intrude on others’ privacy or intimacy, but rather the spirited sense of being alive and being tirelessly curious about what happens around me, with the most genuine desire to open to others, welcome them in my life and see what they bring along. I have always been like this. When I was a kid, as an only child, my parents or grandparents, during sunny days, would bring me to the park to play outdoors and go on the carousels, and I would always ask other kids around their names to play together.

I have always had a particular fascination for other’s lives, hinting at the dim lights glimmering from the windows on the street, watching blithesome friends hanging around while walking on my own, feeling joyful for them, enjoying my pace and solitary remit, knowing I have been the wallflower on the backdrop of a moment in their night just as many time as who knows how many people feeling alike have been the same to my gleeful moments with friends. Growing old, my sheer curiosity about other people transformed into something else. Not too late, after I was small enough to ask other kids their names to start playing together shamelessly, I drew my attention to those who silently stood in the background, observing the world around, trying to go unnoticed—just like I did.

While this transformed into an implicit rebellion in my teenage years, it soon started to shape into a systematic attitude to look where most people would have never looked, stare in the opposite direction from where my peers were looking, falling in love with the underdogs, with the defeated, with the antiheroes in the stories. With the romantic side of failure, with the loud quietness that sprinkles our days and shifts our sights, turning upside down most common perspectives, mainstream beliefs, and outdated principles.

Wars ravage within, outside, and among us. The right-wing is surging again. I cannot see any stability for the next twenty years. World leaders of the major countries worldwide don't even show up at the summit to face global warming—nor even genocides, famines, or poorness. We are powerless against an ongoing genocide live streamed on our smartphones’ screens. I am broken. This world is. Tuning into the background noise is for us like a recipe for surviving this tangled, wicked mess.

The works on view share a sense of conflation between internal fears and external realities. Mobilising a search for intimacy, which also coincides with a quest for a common language and communication, they trace a lost proximity against the havoc of this epoch. background noise was born as a quest into the possibilities of sound and music to communicate what words cannot. The project adjusted itself by suggesting something different from what we were initially looking for, indicating an unexpected route that unfolds through the works of these four artists, at various stages in their careers, with diverse stories and paths.

Carmela De Falco’s environmental installation reflecting, reflecting, the voice transforms the gallery into a space of relational echo and memory. Minimal marks on walls form a primordial score, recalling ancient linguistic symbols and the archeoacoustic studies of reverberating caves. In the accompanying performance, singers mirror and distort each other’s vocalisations, transforming their bodies into vessels of collective memory. The space resonates as an architectural body, embodying both ancient and contemporary modes of connection.

Magdalen Wong introduces us to an utterly artificial landscape and an imagined, non-existent window. Blending consumerist symbols and staged realities she questions authenticity and explores the boundaries between artifice and experience. Through irony and subtle subversion, Wong’s work invites viewers to reconsider the constructed nature of what we perceive as natural or authentic, challenging assumptions about beauty, nostalgia, and the ways we frame our surroundings.

Delving further into the complex interplay between external constructs and internal reflections, Orsola Zane’s paintings address the psychological tension between observation and judgment. Caïn et l'oeil and Cain at the Fishmonger’s draw inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s Film and Victor Hugo’s La Conscience, exploring the unease of perpetual scrutiny. The futile act of locking a door underscores the inescapability of the observer’s gaze, as the viewer is already within the room. This imagery evokes a claustrophobic sense of surveillance, where privacy is an illusion. In Cain at the Fishmonger’s, this internal paranoia extends into the external world. Here, lifeless mantis shrimps, with their double sets of eyes—both real and painted —transform into silent jurors, projecting judgment onto mundane interactions.

Semin Hong’s works Home Riddles and Yesterday the stars woke me up shift the focus from communal resonance to personal displacement and mirrors the nomadic search for stability in a transient world. Engaging with the gallery’s window, it frames a glimpse into an ever-changing landscape that feels both familiar and elusive, composed of varied fragments. The tapestry recalls a puzzle pieced together from disparate elements to evoke a sense of discovery and connection, inviting viewers to confront a longing for home and the melancholic beauty of impermanence.

Background noise is a group exhibition that is triggered by the dissonant soundtrack of our reality, oversaturated with content, digital interconnectedness, real-time fake news, fast-paced communications, and high-speed, low-fare transport. By paradox, it reacts and answers to this scenario imagining a parallel world, sheltering in intimacy, a sense of dwelling in, and uncanniness.

The exhibition title is borrowed from the homonym book by the American artist and sound theorist Brandon LaBelle and his journey through sound and its social, psychological, and spatial implications. Examining how musicians and artists sought to disclose sound’s potential to spill into the global and interpersonal space, LaBelle’s inquiry has shed light on the attempt to seek unspoken communication strategies. Exploring sound’s impact and relation with the elusive slime of architecture and city crowds––swirling by just outside the generous Des Bain gallery’s window––, or calling the audiences into play, background noise is the marginal echo that exposes the foreground’s aspects that remain concealed from master narrations. The uncontrolled vitality of the neglected silently leaks through the wall.

london, milan, and naples
november 2024
giulia pollicita, clara rodorigo




Artists

Carmela De Falco (Italy, 1994) lives and works in Naples. She is interested in investigating reality and subverting it, bringing out its hidden sides, through the symbolic and functional transformation of ordinary objects and behaviours, which allows her to alter codified cultural orders. Starting from the observation of imperceptible things and their connection with the immediately visible, the artist comes to consider the relationship that the individual and the community entertain with the spaces they inhabit and pass through, from the concrete ones, such as domestic and urban architectures, to the mental ones, such as the spaces of resistance and those created by the encounter of the Self with the Other. Recent exhibitions and solo exhibitions include: Memomirabilia, Museo Filangieri, Naples (2024); As far as my body can reach, Negozio (2023); Inhabiting Time, Latte project, Faenza (2022); Contenere il tempo, Exit Strategy (2022); It’s funny to play alone, LO.FT, Lecce (2020). Her works can be found in public and private collections, including: Fondazione Morra Greco (Naples); Quartiere Latino-condominio museo (Naples); Fondazione Cassa diRisparmio di Cento (Ferrara).

Semin Hong (Pennsylvania, 1995) is a South Korean artist who lives and works in London, UK. She studied MA Fine Art at UAL Chelsea College of Arts in London and BFA Painting at Hongik University in Seoul. She was previously an artist in residence at Sarabande Foundation (est. Lee Alexander McQueen) and now is in The Bomb Factory Art Foundation. Semin’s work starts from the belief that every space anyone has ever lived in, whether it’s called home, shelter, or without a name, is inscribed with memory and always left within decipherable traces and marks. Through mixed media installation, she explores relationships between people and home, especially in the context of migration. In her work, the elements of home-whether they are architectural fragments or gestures extracted from ritualistic actions taking place in domestic spaces are isolated and inserted into the new context. By building a temporary shelter in the gallery space and using repeated motifs from her childhood memory, she attempts to navigate immigrant identity and belongingness entwined with the concept of home. Her choice of materials used in the installations relies mostly on portability. She works predominantly with foldable fabrics that could fit in luggage as all her worksare meant to be carried around with her through her personal migration. Objects and videos used in installations function as lexicons indicating personal imageries from her nostalgic memory of the first home.

Magdalen Wong is an artist born in Hong Kong and is currently based in Lisbon. She works mainly with found materials drawn from social media, advertisement, and film, as well as with objects and sounds collected from her daily meanderings. Her recent works wander into various fictitious characters, who often take on roles as mediators between peoples and places, and their histories and futures. Her work inquires into how we alter, influence, adapt to and traverse between our built social environments and our solitary dream spaces. Wong had received grants and attended residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Goyang Art Studio in Seoul, Fjuk Art Center in Iceland, and Triangle Arts, New York. She had exhibited at Kunstinstituut Melly, The Netherlands; Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Spring Workshop + Current Plans, Hong Kong; Asia Society, Hong Kong; Para/Site, Hong Kong; Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; Make room, Los Angeles; Laurence Miller Gallery, New York; and Galeria Avenida da Índia in Lisbon, Portugal.

Orsola Zane (Italy, 1997) graduated summa cum laude in Painting at the Fine Arts Academy of Venice in2020. In 2022, she completed an MFA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 alumna. Statement: “Through oil painting and mixed media sculptures and installations, I investigate isolation, existential anxiety, guilt and the precarious balance between the temptation to harm and the moral imperative to care that underlie all human relationships. I often create sculptural mechanisms of physical entrapment, constriction, or threat. Fixed stares, unhealthy colours, sharp objects and eerie creatures provoke a growing sense of discomfort and tension in an ascending climax that never really reaches its apex. Despite digging into unmotivated fears and problematic approaches to social interaction, there is no therapeutic or reparative outcome to my practice. My intention is rather to isolate and preserve the quiet terror of the moment before the strike, before the violent or self destructive act is completed. Caught in this suspended half-way state, the subjects hover between sacred and profane,relevance and irrelevance, an unbridgeable and infinite instant standing between them and the fullness of lifeor death. Biblical and hagiographic references, interwoven with looney tunes aesthetics, sea creatures and film stills, are re- framed through an atheistic lens in which God exists merely as an unyielding judge that we project in our paranoid need for guilt, punishment and redemption.”






Curators
Giulia Pollicita (Palermo, 1996) is a curator and PhD researcher at the University of the Arts London (UAL) currently based in Naples, where she collaborates as the curator of the Fondazione Morra Greco.
In 2025, she will curate a solo show by Marina Xenofontos at the Fondazione Morra Greco. In 2024 and 2022 she has served as the assistant curator to Pierre Bal-Blanc for a solo exhibition by Cezary Bodzianowski and to Salvatore Lacagnina for an exhibition on Jimmie Durham. Since 2021, she has collaborated as with the Fondazione Elpis in Milan as regional coordinator for Una Boccata d’Arte project. In 2023, she curated the exhibition decentering in Ceramics at the Richard Saltoun Gallery and the residency programme Laboratorio Piramide in Rome. She writes for art magazines such as Flash Art and Flash Art International, among others, and is a member of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN).


Clara Rodorigo (Rome, 1996) is an independent writer and curator based in Milan. She earned a degree in Arts Management at Università Cattolica in Milan and completed an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths University in London, with a thesis on electronic poetry and generative writing techniques. Her research investigates experimental and performative methodologies and their declinations in the editorial and exhibition context, with a focus on sound and poetry. She has been granted the Italian Council 11th Edition for the research project In Lucid Dreams We Dance and has curated projects in the UK at Chisenhale Studios, CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Deptford X, IKLECTIK, Spanners, and in Italy, and currently holds the position of Curatorial Assistant at Threes Productions.




Carmela de Falco, reflecting reflecting the voice 2024







Magdalen Wong, Sunrise/Sunset 2012-2024
kodak slide projection, plants, fans, orange lighting 
(includes screen in original version)



Orsola Zane, Caïn et l’œil, 2023
112 x 87 cm, oil on vanvas


Orsola Zane,  Cain at the fishmonger, 2024
112 x 87 cm, oil on canvas


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