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Tema Celesta
Contemporary Art Magazine
Issue 94 November 2002
Lala Meredith-Vula - Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Torino |
The images contrast between the splendour of architecture
and decoration and the desolate conditions of immigrants who lack
even their essential dignity. This is a recurrent theme in Lala’s
photographs. The artist is sensitive to issues at the margin. She
creates images in black and white, poised between realistic document
and personal observation. A characteristic of her research, as she
points out, is the total refusal to manipulate the images digitally.
Two cycles of works are presented in this exhibition. The bathers
were photographed in public baths at the Albanian Montenegro border.
The baths that are now dilapidated have declined from their ancient
role as a pleasant place, to become a shelter for marginalised women,
mostly nomads. The series “Marginalised people” was created
in Rome. Meredith-Vula invited illegal immigrants that she met by
chance in the streets of the city, to follow her inside the ‘Palazzo
Doria Pamphilj’ and Santa Maria in Aracoeli so that she could
contrast the solemnity of these places and the deprivation of the
“disinherited”. The figures are outlined in all their
suffering humanity, against the perfect architecture that is highlighted
through an effective play of light and shadows.
Tiziana Conti
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