Hurry slowly. At the Memmo Foundation, five artists confront time – Rome – Arte.it

Roma – Works of art, similar to hourglasses, instruments for measuring time, deal with a theme of universal resonance, linked to art history, to the city of Rome and its millennial history.
Is there a time within works of art? The answer can be found in the eleventh chapter of Conversation piecethe cycle of annual exhibitions curated by Marcello Smarrelli, through which the Memmo Foundation offers an overview of the Italian and foreign artists who choose Rome as a place of residence and research.
The title of the exhibition, Hurry slowlyis inspired by the famous Latin expression slow party attributed by Suetonius to Emperor Augustus, which combines the opposing concepts of speed and slowness in an oxymoron. A timely and decisive action, but at the same time careful and thoughtful. Italo Calvino, op American lessonsuses it to refer to the time of creativity: an immediacy that comes from a lightning-fast intuition, made possible by patient adjustments, a bit like the artistic act that can emerge suddenly or mature slowly, but always through a profound process of organization of knowledge.The artists of this eleventh edition were asked to deal with the times through works created especially for the spaces of the Memmo Foundation or presented for the first time in the capital. Prem Sahib introduces the visitor to the exhibition and explores sexuality, intimacy and desire within queer communities. His temporality consists of memories and absences. Helix III (2018) is a plaster relief, with a male figure in the center that embodies the ‘ideal’ body of antiquity. The artist has responded to this by introducing heavy chrome-plated steel piercings, in contrast to the classic posture of the male figure. The relief, a copy of a neoclassical original, was located in the gay sauna ‘Chariots’ in the East End of London, which closed in 2016. Sahib draws on an urban archeology capable of rethinking time and memory.

Enrique Ramìrez, installation overview | Photo: © Daniele Molajoli

Alicja Kwade explores the concepts of time and space with the aim of introducing a sense of derealization from the world and instead brings to the exhibition Super heavy skies (2024), a mobile metal structure with individual elements floating in space. The statue’s arms, inspired by Calder’s mobile phones, are set in motion by the interaction of physical forces that regulate their balance. The work communicates with Assumption of distinctive qualities (2025), composed of a stone that seems to come to life from within, while a wooden branch grows organically by digging and crossing it. In another intervention to optimally measure and display time, Kwade uses copper hands. Paul Maheke has created a new site-specific installation for the exhibition that draws on the iconography of funerals, preserved in archives and Roman cemeteries, to evoke a choreography of ghosts in which past and present are intertwined. Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez has constructed layered narratives centered on the sea, a site of narrative projection in which Chile’s fate is intertwined with broader stories of travel, conquest and migration. The exhibition covers a broad spectrum of techniques and materials, from photography to collage, from light installations to sound.

Enrique Ramìrez, installation overview | Photo: © Daniele Molajoli

In the middle of the room, Four laments over a landscape (2023), is a mobile and sound sculpture that simulates the movement of a ship and introduces a new sensory dimension. Inspired by ancestral instruments native to Ecuador and northern Chile and Peru, the sculpture becomes a soundscape and a meditative act that transforms sound into image. With his painting, Henry Taylor entrusts the portrait with the task of capturing fragments of time. Through the painting exhibited at the Memmo Foundation, Hershal Earl, when he was young, a youngster (2022), the artist seizes an emotion before it disappears.