Yuli Yamagata: Afasta Nefasta

Ordet announces “Afasta Nefasta“, the first solo show in Italy by Brazilian artist Yuli Yamagata, presenting a group of new works within an exhibition design that alters the configuration of the space.

Yamagata’s works move on the border between dream and reality, drawing inspiration from mass culture and pushing the viewers to abandon themselves to the possibilities of her oneiric imagination. An octopus, a snail, a hermit crab and a snake populate the twisted skeleton of the rooms, all tentacular and soft but bearing signs of their human mutation. Yamagata’s creatures can be comforting and disturbing, as the artist employs easily identifiable patterns along with grotesque and surrealistic details inserting new narratives into the works. Their weirdness comes from something that we’re already familiar with, but that suddenly feels a little different.

Spanning between sculpture and painting, her signature works are created by sowing and stuffing a wide range of fabrics, resulting in pictures and shapes that are wonderfully sly. Yamagata plays with her fascination for consumerism, horror novels and 90’s American sci-fi movies perfectly mixing it with her Japanese background references and our generation’s mundane habits. The trait-d’union lies in the idea of an intelligence that evolves and adapts—squidgy and malleable but surprising—like a mollusk.