A jury whose members include Dan Cameron - curator at New York's New Museum -, Flaminio Gualdoni - art historian and professor of Milan's Accademia di Brera -, Kasper König - director of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Rosa Martínez - curator and art critic from Barcelona -, Hans Ulrich Obrist - curator at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris -, carefully evaluated the work of the four artists selected, and assigned the Premio Regione Piemonte 2001 to American artist Laylah Ali, with the following motivation: "the work of Laylah Ali, in its simplicity and clarity, nevertheless reveals a tension that is relevant for individuals today. It is a tension between psychological and social identity. By abstracting her character from any realistic contextual reference, Laylah Ali gives her viewers the chance to meditate about their autonomy and, at the same time, their role in the community at large. These aspects of her work appear to be important at a point in history when great transformations are taking place, and doubts are being raised".
"... In her works, Laylah Ali borrows the esthetic and conceptual meanings of Francisco Goya, Persian miniatures, Art Spiegelman and the Sunday comics. The bold colors and the smaller-scale size in the series of the Greenheads, i.e. the protagonists of her works, can often be deceitful: when viewed from afar, they express a cheerful optimism, a pleasure that seems to be over and above everything. Only a closer look reveals that these intimate, well-designed works hide a disconcerting story made of of arbitrary whim, humiliation, rituals, conditioned faithfulness and grotesque miniature images. In the work Untitled (2000) we see two Greenheads dressed in white and wearing tall hats, in conversation with two other Greenheads dressed in blue bathing suits and carrying animated heads without bodies. All these characters are wearing training shoes and one of the white-dressed characters is holding a ball. These materializations of the American obsession with sports and white uniforms recalling those of the Ku Klux Klan, the Pope-like majesty and the figure of the idiot in the recreation center are significant images that belong to the system of codes used by Laylah Ali [...]. In the face of this kind of open language without a dictionary, the viewer is left the freedom to read between the lines. Although apparently impossible to ascribe to a specific gender and race, the black skin of Ali's characters inevitably carries symbolical implications, referring to an American reality that is strongly determined by race. In their fearless goggle eyes and grimaces the Greenheads recall the American tradition of the 19th century, when the black body was routinely demeaned, ridiculed, and politically neutralized, all under the mask of harmless amusement...".
(Olukemi Ilesanmi)
Exhibited artists
Gabriele Picco, Laylah Ali, Muntean/Rosenblum, Thomas Scheibitz
