Senza titolo (Alicudi vista da sottacqua), 2003

Paola Pivi uses the world as if it were a playing field. She takes a truck and turns it over on its side, seizes an airplane and tips it over, gathers one hundred Chinese people dressed identically, brings a group of white animals into an industrial warehouse, or photographs two zebras in the snow. Extracted from the reality of the world, but corresponding to an image previously conceived by the artist, each of Pivi’s works respects only its own internal rules and does not emerge to demonstrate anything other than itself, or, as the artist says, “perhaps what it demonstrates has not yet been revealed.”

While extremely dissimilar, the artist’s works all share components of a performative nature and a tendency to push toward extreme limits. [...]