The Lia Rumma Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the new work Together forever by Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini on Wednesday 11 May 2005 at 7.00 p.m.
In the video and the photographs on display, the two artists explore current political and cultural events as well as the conflictual aspects of love relationships through a reinterpretation of the myth of Salome and St John the Baptist.
The act of decapitation, far from being demeaned to the status of a barbaric act, is assimilated in all the wars waged in the name of God. The love story that Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini imagine has taken place between the two characters enables us to view the event from a different perspective. Their antagonistic relationship can be interpreted, albeit on a small scale, as symbolic of the conflict between peoples. John the Baptist is seen as a moraliser who is capable of predicting great tragedies, but he is unable to understand his partner’s feelings and to grasp the difference between the universal and the individual. Salome is a sensual woman who dances out of a healthy instinct for frivolity, but she seems incapable of looking at reality in its overall complexity.
