Elisa Giardina Papa | A Naked-Eye Blue | Galerie Tanja Wagner | 21.04.2026-30.05.2026

Galerie Tanja Wagner is pleased to present A Naked-Eye Blue, a solo exhibition by Elisa Giardina Papa.

At the core of the exhibition is a selection of works developed in relation to She Flickered In and Out of History, a film and glass installation completed over the past two years following Giardina Papa’s award of the Italian Council grant (13th edition, 2024).

The work explores the entangled geological, mythological, and political temporalities of the Mediterranean, recounting the tale of an island that emerged from and disappeared back into the sea.

In 1831, a submarine volcanic eruption gave rise to a new island between Tunisia and Sicily, igniting a violent sovereignty dispute among European powers. Just five months later, the island vanished beneath the surface. Moving between historical records and speculative narration, the work reflects on the revelatory potential of an island that refused to be annexed.

Conceived as an elemental video environment, the film presented in the gallery immerses viewers in a shifting ecosystem of submerged and resurfacing matter. The island, rather than appearing as a fixed, annexable entity, remains elusive, rendered visually and sonically through formations of seawater ripples, pyroclastic flows, volcanic ash, and drifting pumice rafts. Filmed on Mount Etna, Stromboli, and the submerged slopes of Mediterranean volcanic islands, the cinematic scenarios leave historical actors and accounts outside the frame.

The exhibition also includes A Naked-Eye: Light Fields, a series of cameraless photographs produced by exposing light-sensitive paper directly in the darkroom. These works register light itself, generating fields of color through a subtractive process by flashing complementary hues of light to produce the final tone. Each piece is unique, created in a single exposure. Areas of unexposed paper are deliberately retained, registering the suspension of the paper during light inscription as a trace of process.

Like the chromatic stanza of the film’s poem, the series draws on historical observations recorded in the aftermath of the 1831 eruption, when volcanic particles and sulfur aerosols dispersed across vast regions, including the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean, altering the scattering of sunlight. During that summer, observers reported the appearance of blue, purple, and green suns. The poem’s color sequence and these monochromes draw on this record of observations, translating accounts of the 1831 “naked-eye blue suns” into photographic form. Each panel functions as a material register of this event, treating color as a memory of light and atmospheric dispersion.

This exploration extends into a series of hand-cast glass panels, which further engage with altered solar phenomena. Both the cameraless chromogenic prints and the glass works incorporate fragments of the film poem, originally composed by poet Megan Fernandes, based on the artist’s archival research and film script; the film’s original score is composed by duendita.

At a time when logics of conquest are once again being forcefully enacted, A Naked-Eye Blue invites reflection on how such claims are constructed, and how they might dissolve. Giardina Papa’s work gestures toward forces that exceed human histories of ownership, claim, and control, reminding us of a scale of existence that unsettles boundaries and fixed formations.

She Flickered In and Out of History, from which this body of work emerges, forms part of a trilogy of video works exploring forgotten Mediterranean histories that challenge given understandings of borders and belonging. It follows U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale (2022), which premiered at the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams.

Elisa Giardina Papa’s research-based art practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been disqualified and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Through critical yet poetic framing, she works across large-scale video installation, experimental films, as well as ceramic and glass sculptures, to draw attention to those parts of our lives which remain radically unruly, untranslatable, and incomputable.

She is also a founding member of the artist collective Radha May. Together with Indian artist Nupur Mathur and Ugandan artist Bathsheba Okwenje, they develop performances and art installations that reveal hidden histories and peripheral sites, exploring their relation to gender, sexuality, and the legacies of colonialism.

Elisa Giardina Papa has recently been awarded the prestigious Italian Council – Edizione 13 grant for her new project, She Flickered In and Out of History, as well as the Solo Show Prize at the 64th Premio Termoli at Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Termoli, Italy. She is currently working on a project that will premiere at ICA London in summer 2026. She held a major solo exhibition at MAMBO – Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (2025/2026) and has further shown her works at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2025); Fondazione Trussardi, Milan (2024); HKW, Berlin (2024); Secession Wien (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); ICA London (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); ICA Milano (2020); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017), among others.