So to Speak
Brit Barton
A probable flight to Brindisi,
A long car ride to Lecce,
Finding a parking spot somewhere,
A few turns down several alleys to a mostly isolated one,
Ringing the bell at the entrance of a Baroque palazzo,
Crossing the courtyard,
Walking up to the second floor,
and then—hopefully arriving with an appointment and/or during open hours—
See Jamie Sneider, the warmly welcoming curator and director.
To put it plainly, in order to see Cinema Anita, one has to really want to.
If there is any artwork that could encapsulate Emamifar’s practice thus far, this one might be it. In that last room, after all that choreography of arrival, you are met with a work that is barely there. Or rather, it is hiding in plain sight, yet fundamentally site-specific. At Progetto, a conspicuous installation of acoustic wood paneling from a dilapidated and defunct silent cinema a few towns over has been reconceived. If you weren’t a Progetto regular—and the majority of the international audience isn’t—you could assume the installation was a remnant of the former bourgeois living room or a miscellaneous office space.
And that tracks. One of the signature gestures of Emamifar seems to be this Kafkaesque intersection—or breaking point—between the built environment, bureaucracy, and existential exhaustion. Yet it is often manifested through a material tension that is somehow nearly seamless despite an incredibly taxing research or construction process. (A noteworthy reminder that Emamifar was, first and foremost, trained as an architect.)
I’m told that the meticulous technical aspects of Cinema Anita, like all the work in Disjecta, are executed through a wide network of Puglia-based connections.1 Each wood panel was individually removed, with the 1920s-era nails stripped, kept, and reused, then reconfigured on-site in Progetto without losing any of the panels’ original dimensions. One modification, a single miter joint, can be found along the wainscoting—if you know where to look.
While it is exacting in its precision, does all that production justify itself as inherently interesting? Emamifar’s practice is so adamant about its placeness that questions of displacement, liminality, or paralysis become apparent. The object’s embedded labor—or what might otherwise be noted as its context or meaning—is meant to transcend the physical into the ontological. And it does. The human condition of alienation is universal, not at all specific to Lecce, but would Cinema Anita have the same metaphorical weight in a metropolitan museum? Furthermore, does it need to? Such demands are rarely placed on other contemporary commercial or institutional works, which are expected to circulate beyond their sites of origin.
Niloufar Emamifar: Disjecta, Progetto, 2025, installation view
Niloufar Emamifar: Disjecta, Progetto, 2025, installation view
Where I stay stumbling is in how I arrived: how am I meant to interpret meaning when all the built-in narrative is only available by word of mouth? One could walk into the Cinema Anita installation, look closely (or not), read the title and the materials list (or not), and be done with it. But it would be a mistake to resist the conversational allure of craftsmanship, production, and politics that form the backdrop of Puglia—Southern Italy’s rural, idyllic, and rapidly evolving ecosystem in the face of climate catastrophe, desertion, property speculation, and overtourism. The oral history of the work—an offer rather than a requirement at Progetto—is what makes the journey there so intrinsic to the experience. Isn’t that heightened intimacy of understanding what we long for in the mired state of contemporary art?
Elsewhere in Disjecta, the massive cast works Manduria and The Wolves (both 2025) are part of a typical process Emamifar undertakes in her site-specific practice. Here, as in previous exhibitions in Los Angeles and Vienna, she has identified as historically fraught sites and/or legally unsettled pieces of land to cast and exhibited in abstraction. It is a testament to the ubiquity of infrastructural failings and bureaucratic negligence that the artist can theoretically repeat this process anywhere.
After discussions with city officials—including the mayor—the townships of Manduria and Marittima were the two sites with small areas of indeterminacy, where the positive casts were made. Upright masses intermixing resin, soil, asphalt, and detritus, their spectrum of gray and textured surface juxtapose the smooth, bare white wall. Their presence, along with their uneven boundaries, registers like an isolated island in a vast blue sea.
Upon entry to Progetto, the first work, One day. Ash. (2025), is slightly elevated off the ground onto a granite platform. A black-and-white Super 8 film on a Hantarex monitor, the work runs for two minutes and twenty-three seconds on an indefinite loop. Like Cinema Anita, the work is sustained through an oral history. The central figure—a local, retired opera singer known only as Antonia—is seen singing, but only on the condition that the film will be exhibited in silence. The footage is a result of such an epic tale of happenstance: needing to reshoot due to an initial mechanical failure, the remaining opportunity to film on location was almost thwarted by a wildfire the night before, which decimated the provincial landscape and nearly destroyed Antonia’s home. In an attempt to give it a single final try, One day. Ash. was shot once more, the air thick with ash and smoke still smoldering from the ground. Inaudibly, Antonia performs to the exact time of Tu che di gel sei cinta (you who are surrounded by ice), an aria from Puccini’s final opera, Turandot (1926), about a stoic Persian princess from Turan. Antonia’s gestures are captured with such immense and commanding force that I realize sound is unnecessary to complete the image of loss and despair, survival and sovereignty.
While it is an impressive story and evocative film, it is less compelling to think of the work as one that initiates Disjecta than as one that must be renegotiated in order to leave it. Foundational to the objecthood of the artist’s hardcore sculptural materiality is the ephemerality of language that both surrounds the work and simultaneously evades it. Bookended by silence that must be confronted and comforted by conversation on-site, the exhibition fills the air with tension. The exhibition wants to say more with work that has so much to say. This artistic distance—seemingly so cool on the one hand but still so controlled on the other—raises a recurring question: why must artwork always remain so bound to doctrine?
1. The meticulous technical aspects of Cinema Anita, like all of the work in Disjecta, and like all the exceedingly impressive exhibitions at Progetto, are so intertwined with Sneider as an irreplaceable savant producer and person. The sheer capacity of due diligence and know-how in one person; it's mystifying. She is easily, without a doubt, one of the most interesting and exciting persons in contemporary art production today.