Francesca Mirabile
Lo spiritello di pietra
Acciaio e carta
Veduta della mostra PORTOFRANCO
Photo credit: Cosimo Filippini

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH FRANCESCA MIRABILE

What if we tried to imagine a place where past present and future coexist in a perpetual instant?
Do the co-protagonists know they are protagonists? Figures that are born and inhabit different moments here converge in image and matter.
I would like to invite them to dinner, introduce them to one another.
And what if the banquet were an attempt to evoke the black hole? There would be no time passing for me and my guests.

Studies for Faustian Bargain
2026
Silkscreen 68,5 x 48,5 cm each
Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Berlin | Istanbul
Photograph: Kayhan Kaygusuz

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH IZ ÖZTAT

Since relocating from Istanbul to Berlin in 2023, I have engaged with foundational German-language narratives, like the Faust myth and the Kasperle puppet tradition, to trace how they shape national consciousness and mold compliant citizens. In a cultural landscape where the state dictates the moral lessons to be drawn from its history, I reclaim these narratives to chart Germany’s escalating oppression. Quoting historical engravings and woodcuts, the triptych Studies for Faustian Bargain (2026) is a step in this process, utilizing the Faustian pact to interrogate artistic agency, complicity, and the ideological implications of state funding.

Paola Di Bello
Detail from ‘Community Specific Archive’
2026
Collage of photographic prints and various museum materials
Courtesy: the artist and CSAC – Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, University of Parma

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH PAOLA DI BELLO

The materials I choose − portraits, but landscapes as well − are photographed by decontextualizing the subject, focusing the frame on specific details of the original image. I isolate, crop, highlight, and invert. The who, how, what, where, when, and why of the primary photograph are no longer legible or even comprehensible. They no longer hold any importance.
Ultimately, these are photographs of photographs. Yet, photography has always decontextualized and recontextualized, that is its primary function, its inherent power.
…at this stage, my images are still “in potentia” – raw, unrefined matter. And yet, a simple shift in perspective is all it takes to give substance to entirely different worlds.

Laurent Le Deunff
La grisaille persiste encore, avec toutefois une possibilité d’éclaircies
Le Parvis, 2025
Courtesy: Le Parvis, Ibos & Semiose, Paris
Photo: Valérie Servant

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH LAURENT LE DEUNFF

I never feel alone when I’m working.
I’m surrounded by ghosts.

RM photographed by Mathilde Agius, 2023

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH RM

When the platform started in 2015 its name was written in extenso as Real Madrid. It would be what in Naples would be called a parallelo, a counterfeit product, often of luxury. A parallel track, destined never to intersect with authenticity, but always running at the same distance from it.
Eventually, the name changed in 2022, keeping a flexible pronunciation either /reˈal maˈðɾið/ or /ˈreɪəl məˈdrɪd/, or several others, difficult to control.
Started collaboratively, RM works now as a free-standing identity; a display cabinet to be decorated or emptied, or just a word with hesitant meanings.
¡Hala! I guess?

Olmo Erba and Eleonora Molignani
Al posto delle fragole
2024
Video
54′, variable dimensions
Performance and video created in collaboration with The Blank Contemporary Art
Ph: Paolo Biava

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH OLMO ERBA AND ELEONORA MOLIGNANI

In an age lobotomized by the circularity of an eternal present, cutting out and tailoring the zeitgeist of past eras in our own image and likeness becomes an act as poetic as it is political.
Perhaps escaping history is the only way to re-enter it.
Our “semiophagy” is the murky dreamscape of a fairy tale mistaken for truth — a way to imagine ourselves as players in a time that, though not our own, still manages to describe us.
It is the perversion of the dance of symbols, through an immersion in the nauseating alchemy of a saturnine banquet that blends the grotesque with the sensual, pleasure with disgust, the sweetness of strawberries with the urge to vomit.

Adelisa Selimbašić
Pink orchid, Red orchid; Purple orchid (Flowers)
2025
Oil on canvas
132.8 x 76.2cm
Ph Riccardo Gasperoni
Courtesy of Tommaso Calabro gallery and the artist

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH ADELISA SELIMBAŠIĆ

With the heat, I slip off the protections
I had put on for winter,
So many thin layers to peel away
With time – if you’ll be patient.
I’ll grow soft inside
As I already am on the outside, on the skin
Between our legs, on
Our tongues, which slowly
We’ll learn to speak.

[Undressing by Annachiara Vispi]

Almudena Romero
Family Identity
From the series Family Album, The Pigment Change
2020
Photograph printed on cress
180 x 120 cm
Courtesy of the artist and IPERCUBO Gallery

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH ALMUDENA ROMERO

I come from women who grew things — oranges, families, knowledge, culture.
My work began in their garden, where recognition faltered but light persisted.
I farm images — sometimes evolving and disappearing, like them. Like us.
Not fixed. They breathe, fade, unfold.
Other times, fossilised. Rooted in time.
Photography, for what it is: light transforming.
In my work, a writing co-authored with plants.
A performative, artistic act.
A tool for self-expression.
A fragile gesture of robust resistance.
A critique of the limitedly archival.
A defence of the unlimitedly ephemeral.
A conciliation between needing to produce —
and to exist.

Ismaele Nones
A chi parlo quando parlo
2024
Acrylic painting on canvas
170×270 cm
Courtesy and ph: the artist

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH ISMAELE NONES

Within a work of art there must be time. Sometimes this time is defined, or merely suggested and left to the imagination. Other times, the time is infinite. An endless instant, a time that does not pass but is compressed into a single, precise moment. When this happens, the work of art becomes eternal. It knows neither age nor youth, it is always present, newly born, freshly conceived, freshly created. It exists outside of time because it is perpetually present.

Sara Enrico, Cell Keepers, 2023
sublimation printing on polyester fabric, foam rubber, titanium
137 x 180 x 46 cm; 150 x 185 x 43 cm.

Sara Enrico, Tainted Lovers, OGR Torino, 2023
Courtesy: the artist and Vistamare Milano / Pescara
Photo: Floriana Giacinti

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH SARA ENRICO

The sleeping person closes his eyes so he can open them to night. Inside himself, beneath the eyelids that sink with sleep, and that were already there, throughout the whole day, solely that there might be evoked, lowering their awnings at times, the always possible imminence of a night in broad daylight […] is nothing other than the night itself. […]. Night identifies outside with inside; the eye sees it in the underside of things, the back of the eyelids, the invisible layer of the other side of things, […],skins turned inside out.

(from The Fall of Sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy)