In My Nightmare The Title Was Cuteness

Associated with something innocent, small, pink, big eyed, soft, cuddly – this exhibition stresses the inherent complex power and violence structures of cuteness as well as its subversive and empowering aspects.

In her Tumblr blog entry-like collages and face filter-inspired drawings, Gaia Del Santo explores pop cultural notions of girlhood and femininity as spectacle. Drawing on net cultural trends and methods of online self-representation, Gaia Del Santo tackles the connections to the attention economy and consumerism of the TikTok era.

In their immersive patchwork textile installation No child left behind (2021), artist duo Giacomo Giannantonio and Viola Morini brings memes and random internet images back to the haptic by printing them on cloth. While hearts, fur frames, and the colourful patches evoke a cute, homely aesthetic, the included, often politically loaded memes oscillate between sugarcoating pressing topics and a humorous survival strategy.

Advertisement (Gauloises 1978-2023) by the artist duo UMORISMO MISTERIOSO (Ṣtefan Tănase & Marina Luz Ferla) is an inquiry into how cuteness shapes ideals, morals, and values. This aesthetic category is a powerful tool to trigger feelings of joy, fun, and pleasure but also uneasiness and discomfort. The attractiveness of cuteness is held within its quality of being familiar and unknown at once. Born in Zurich in 1999, Gaia Del Santo attended ZHdK, completing the BA Fine Arts program in 2022 with distinction. Her body of work centers around our constant online self-broadcast, the slippery concept of the personal, and notions of self-representation in the eye of social media and the attention economy. Through installation, photography, and video, she explores these themes in the figure of the 20-something-year-old woman as the ideal consumer model, translating digitally contingent experiences into physical space. She often draws from popular culture, and activities that heavily influenced her growing up online, such as watching Get Ready With Me’s on Youtube, making Polyvore vision board, curating her Tumblr blog, and taking selfies.

UMORISMO MISTERIOSO is an artist duo founded in 2023 whose works explore the intersection between art and architecture. Marina Luz Ferla’s practice is based on art and architecture research, with a strong interest in philosophy. At the same time, Ștefan Tănase is a multidisciplinary artist who works across various mediums, including printing, sculpture, and installations. Together, they elaborate thought-provoking installations by questioning how art is exhibited and how accessible it is to the public. Their work is characterized by a combination of performative and participatory methods, sometimes encouraging or discouraging engagement. Their works often include editorial projects that focus on the theoretical references at their works’ base.

Giacomo Giannantonio (b. 1998) and Viola Morini (b. 1997) got to know each other during their studies at Brera Academy of Fine Arts and immediately began to collaborate in various ways. in 2019, they curated their first offsite exhibition Lo zoo di vetro at the Bovisa gasometer in Milan. In 2020 they collaborated together to create the visual identity of Pianeta Fresco by working on the website as designers. In 2021 they set up the duo exhibition NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND at Dimora Artica (Milan) and later they moved to Venice where they opened Venice Luggage Deposit, an independent art space aimed at the lagoon art community. In 2022 they held two workshops on DIY printing and wood working at Pianeta Fresco (Parma). In 2023 they collaborated together again to produce the installation Mud Puddling exhibited at BASE Milano.