Rossella Biscotti — Lovers, 2026

For more than a decade, Rossella Biscotti has examined how systems of classification shape the ways people are seen and understood. Her new work, Lovers, redirects the same logic of classification towards intimate experience. Instead of institutional systems classifying populations, the artist assembles fragments of information drawn from memories and relationships. Eyes, ears and mouths are rendered in gold thread on silk, recalling their historical use as symbols of political authority, now echoed in technologies of image recognition.
In the adjacent room, the 10 x 10 series (2014-2015) translates anonymised data from the Belgian census into textiles woven using the Jacquard process. Developed in Lyon, the Jacquard loom made it possible to convert woven patterns into coded information, laying the foundations for modern computing. Categories such as age, gender, nationality and coupling preferences reappear in Men 25-45, where dating apps inherit the filtering logic of the census.
Lovers reverses this logic: the artist fragments and reconnects traces of individual relationships — platonic, real and fictional lovers pieced together from photographs, memories and online images, reduced to a single line of gold thread. Love here exceeds the individual, extending into labour, politics and systems of value: gold, historically tied to religious, state and military authority, recalls textile traditions where such motifs -eyes and ears- were woven into the garments of queens and Persian pashas, now echoing the visual language of AI data visualisation and image recognition.

Across film, sculpture, performance and sound, Rossella Biscotti addresses narratives and systems of power. Her practice operates as a form of critical reconstruction, drawing attention to marginalised or overlooked histories, while exploring the relationships between memory, testimony, and the production of collective knowledge.