Galleria Franco Noero is pleased to present L☿ver, the first solo exhibition by Dara Friedman in Torino hosted in the ‘In Residence’ space of Via Mottalciata.

Dara Friedman uses everyday sights and sounds as the raw material for film and video artworks that rever-berate with emotional energy. A former student of the famously rigorous Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka, Friedman engages tendencies in 20th-century experimental cinema that call for a radical reduction of the medium to its most essential material properties. In place of linear storylines, her films typically portray straightforward gestures and situations that unfold according to predetermined rules and guidelines.Yet for all of Friedman’s strenuous logic and discipline, her approach remains unabashedly sensual and emotive. Bear-ing rich imagery and a strong emphasis on bodily experience, her films generate moments of high-pitched, cathartic intensity as well as serene, even euphoric interludes. In recent years, Friedman has increasingly explored the charged boundaries between the public and private spheres, working with musicians, dancers, actors, and other individuals selected through casting calls and auditions. These experimental collaborations dovetail with the artist’s longstanding endeavor to use her work as a means of engendering empathy while pounding on the walls that separate viewer from subject, artist from audience, self from other.

L☿ver is a new film the artist has purposedly conceived for the exhibition: L☿ver creates a synesthesia, an experience of a dream to access the powerful vision of an ur-mensch: a Phallic Woman.
This work meditates on the opening flute notes of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, allowing the flute to reveal itself as an object embodying feminine and masculine principles, a shamanic power tool: a wand to be taken in hand and blown that also contains a hollow conduit, a physical passage for vibrational, transformational wind.

An experiential poem, L☿ver employs non-objective color fields to dissolve the physical images -the striding woman, the goats bearing witness, a dancer in the kitchen, the flute, the red rocky tunnels- to create both a sense of permanence and fleeting.