LIFE IN LIE, FRANCESCO CAGNIN

Lars von Trier's favourite film was Jørgen Leth's The Perfect Human (1967), which he claimed to have watched some twenty times. In The Five Obstructions (2003), he called it "a little gem that we're now going to ruin," and set Leth the task of remaking it five times, each version bound by increasingly punishing conditions.

When meeting for the first time in Barcelona, Francesco Cagnin asked for limitations, for his hands to be tied. He wanted to “play” (compulsively). We asked Francesco to make a work about love. He never got back to us on that. We asked him, another time, to make a work treating ethics as a structural problem rather than a moral one. Did you keep that one, Francesco?

During the preparation of Life in Lie there was, for a while, an image problem as any image seemed too partial. The broader image became too abstract. And everything else — the riddle he avoided, because riddles, a trigger-word, are sentimental (they believe obstruction exists in order to be solved); the diagram he wouldn't employ (because diagrams are even more moralistic than riddles) — came down to the same fundamental suspicion: to make something clear, one first has to agree on what the information is, and why it has been arranged that way. This is very convenient, unless convenience is the problem.

The remaining questions were therefore practical.

An artist born in Mirano, on the mainland of Venice, and based in Zurich, Switzerland, Francesco Cagnin studied at IUAV (Venice), SOMA (Mexico City), and graduated at ECAL (Lausanne) in 2016. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Autokomanda Belgrade, Kunsthalle Zürich, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Fondation Ricard Paris, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Venezia and the 16th Quadriennale di Roma.

The exhibition is supported by Arts Council Norway.