Spread Over the Ocean Bed

Black Liquid Art Gallery presents Spread Over the Ocean Bed, the first solo exhibition in Italy of Nirveda Alleck (Mauritius, 1975), curated by Antonella Pisilli. At its centre is the video Insular
Variations II – Arise, shown concurrently at the 2nd International Biennale of Contemporary Art of Durrës, alongside seven paintings made between 2017 and 2024.

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A woman stands still in shallow water, at the exact point where the land ends and the ocean begins. Beneath her feet lies a continent: beneath Mauritius there really are traces of Mauritia, an ancient continental landmass sunk into the Indian Ocean. This is where Insular Variations II – Arise takes shape, begun in 2016 and taken up and re-edited by the artist ten years later, and it is from here that the whole exhibition can be read.

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Alleck looks for what remains beneath: beneath an island, beneath an image, beneath the history we have been told, beneath an identity that others would like to define on our behalf.

“In her work, what lies submerged is not what has died. It is what keeps on acting without being seen,” observes
Antonella Pisilli, Curator.

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In the large frieze Continuum Dakar, men and women met in the street are painted without anything that might explain who they are: we see them perfectly, and yet we cannot classify them. It is a reversal of the colonial gaze that meets Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity, also at the heart of How Dark Are Your Thoughts. Then the gaze shifts from collective history to a personal one:
a third-generation descendant of Indian indentured labourers who arrived in Mauritius after the abolition of slavery, in Divine Weapons, She had many thoughts in her head and Heart on Leaves Alleck questions her own inheritance, down to an anatomical heart sewn from a fabric that has travelled between India, Europe and Mauritius. Because an identity is never just one thing.

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Nirveda Alleck trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town and at the Glasgow School of Art. She has exhibited at the Dak’Art Biennale, where she was a laureate in 2010, at Art Basel, at the Bamako Encounters photography biennale (2020) and at the Gwangju Biennale (2024). She is represented by Black Liquid Art Gallery.

Written by Antonella Pisilli