In via Stradella 4, Joan Jonas (New York, 1936) presents the installation Empty
Rooms II, as her fourth solo show at the gallery.
The second iteration of this project, also presented at the Nam June Paik Art Center South Korea in 2025, belongs to a new chapter in Jonas’ latest research: an invitation to the public to contemplate the connections between familiarity and loss through an interpretative work, rather than an explanatory one. Through her decade long practice, pioneering performance and video art, Jonas revisits and reshapes videos, sounds, sculptures and installation, in an act of continuous and lively re- reading, archiving and interpreting.
Jonas fuels a process of transmission that generates a visual archive, In Empty Rooms II, six sculptures made of Japanese Torinoko paper mounted on organic steel structures are hanging from the ceiling, drifting in the gallery space as fleeting, luminous and mysterious shapes. As seemingly flying ghosts, they incarnate the idea of “empty rooms” and float above the visitors as abstent presences.
On the central wall, a video projection taken from They Come to Us without a Word, presented at the USA pavillion of the 56Th Biennale di Venezia in 2015, where some silhouettes interact with structures and forms from Joan’s performative imagery. The sequence is mostly inspired by the ghosts stories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which is where the artist has been working and staying since the seventies, giving shape to new ecological stories rooted in myth and literature. “Ghosts are very much alive there, as everywhere in the world”, says Joan Jonas. She adds: “We are haunted, the rooms are haunted”.
In the room resonates an original sound piece created by pianist and composer Jason Moran. The long-standing partnership between the two, started in 2005, has found one of its most significant moments in Reanimation, a performance work developed between 2010 and 2012 and also presented in Joan Jonas. Light Time Tales at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in 2014.
A number of drawings on paper complete the installation and roam freely on the wall. Drawing has always been a fundamental practice for Jonas and intersects deeply with performance, as a moment of production and of inspiration.
Empty Rooms II makes absence and loss visible, evoking the fragility of nature in a condition of rapid change, but indispensably bonding with the concept of rebirth and permanence in memory.