Naturalis Historia

BUILDING presents, from September 10th to October 12th, 2024, Naturalis Historia, a two-person exhibition of artists Linda Carrara and Mikayel Ohanjanyan. By hosting a selection of both sculptural and pictorial works, the exhibition project offers an unprecedented comparison of their different artistic researches that investigate the common theme of nature.

The title of the exhibition, Naturalis Historia, which can be translated as “observation of nature,” refers to the famous treatise by Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.), an encyclopedic work containing a multitude of studies on the natural world.
The analysis of the world, whether understood as natural or human, in both the macrocosm and microcosm, continues to inspire and inform contemporary art by allowing artists to rework deeper themes of identity, connection, bond, and duality. Linda Carrara and Mikayel Ohanjanyan, in their two solo exhibitions hosted by BUILDING – each with a different approach – observe what surrounds them, and they translate it with a unique perspective through their art practice.

Linda Carrara investigates the landscape and our perception of nature, revealing in her poetics the double in the world and in human nature. Mikayel Ohanjanyan concretely represents in his sculptures the invisible but real bonds between human beings in a tangible union of ancient and modern memories.

Linda Carrara (Bergamo, 1984), through several pictorial works, proposes a project on the uniqueness of the double that in nature presents itself with different faces and arouses different visions. From the landscape that doubles and is reflected on the surface of water, to the day and night that, since the dawn of centuries, divide the world into two parts, contiguous but opposite. The works and analysis of the landscape illustrate the multiple aspects of mirroring and doubling, even to the point of investigating the double of our own human nature. Moreover, in a study of self-portraiture, the artist depicts herself in a pencil drawing with a simple line. The line that separates reality and its double in the mirroring on the surface.

Mikayel Ohanjanyan (Yerevan, Armenia, 1976), exhibits a basalt work specifically made for the exhibition, and unpublished sculptures belonging to the series Ties [Legami]. The artist’s research focuses on the human being and the observation of his inner and outer world. In particular, Ohanjanyan’s works reflect the bonds and tensions that exist in human relationships. According to the artist, “we are connected by invisible bonds,” quoting Nikola Tesla, which allow us to be seismographs of the vibrations emanating from everything around us. A “Whole,” which is defined by space itself, time, nature, matter with its rhythms and forms, and the human being. In connections we rediscover Oneness, that is, our balance with the “Whole,” the cohesion between opposites, also inherent in human nature. The latter, seemingly formless and disharmonious like the surface of a stone marked by time, reveals within it a solid network of memories and recollections that structure and shape our existence and our paths. An inexorable interweaving of ancient and modern memories from which it seems impossible to free oneself.