Amalia Pica: UMMA Projects

Motivated by a desire for civic participation, Amalia Pica’s work often takes the form of temporary interventions on buildings, monuments, or objects, documenting the artist’s insertion of her own body into the landscape or her subtle alteration of it. The London-based Argentinian artist (b. 1978) works primarily with sculpture, photography, film, and installation, adopting a conceptual approach marked by wit and a sense of play.

Perception, time, memory, and a sense of how particular gestures read in different cultural contexts are central to Pica’s work, alternately highlighting moments of connection and disjunction. The promise – as well as the uncertainty – of communication is a persistent concern in Pica’s oeuvre. Megaphones, antennae, podiums, and signal flags are recurring motifs, though rarely are these devices shown in a moment of use. Depicted at rest or disconnected from their functionality, they become figures for potential communication, carriers of a message that always remains hypothetical.