Ordet is pleased to announce Troubles, a show organized in partnership with HEAD, the Haute école d’art et de design in Geneva, co-curated with Charlotte Laubard. The exhibition features new and recent work by Debbie Alagen, Sarah Benslimane, Sebastian Davila, and Viola Leddi, who graduated from HEAD in 2021 and 2022.

In the extremely networked and highly professionalized lives of artists today, art education has come to take on crucial significance and status, offering a key to achieving critical reception and the economic viability of their practice. Collaborating with international art schools to present artists at the beginning of their careers is one of Ordet’s founding missions. For all the above-mentioned artists, Troubles is their first institutional show in Italy.

Debbie Alagen (b. 1997 in Kinshasa, lives and works in Geneva) explores the tension between the mutually conflicting expectations of the individual and the society. To Alagen, physical and psychic places and times—what happened or what might have happened—are transitory. What remains is their impact on bodies and things, and on interpersonal relations.

In her sculptural paintings, Sarah Benslimane (b. 1997 in Besançon, lives and works in Geneva) combines various elements to surprising effect, challenging the limits of the medium and questioning the status of the artwork, reflecting on its trivialization.

Sebastian Davila (b. 1992 in Lausanne, lives and works in Lausanne) creates works that address the legacy of colonialism which still impacts life in his native Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Conjuring up characters and rituals, fictional yet plausible, Davila offers a form of critical, surreal escapism.

The airbrushed paintings of Viola Leddi (b. 1993 in Milan, lives and works in Geneva) are rather gloomy and hallucinatory, condensing references from Italian art history, the history of feminism, the internet, and the reality of her daily life. Her ceramic works are vehicles of related memories, recreating the settings of love episodes told to her in confidence by friends.

Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the artists in the exhibition negotiate identity, feminism, political structures, technology, and art historical references within the current overflow of information, history, images, and styles. Despite the wide diversity of their practices, all share a keen attention to the ironic details present in social and personal relations, as well as a penchant for the demystification of the perceived restrictions and predominant traits of today’s world and of what is expected from art. The exhibition architecture, commissioned from b.b.—Fabrizio Ballabio and Alessandro Bava—emphasizes the divergence of languages and the convergence of focuses at play in the show.