nervi delle volpi

Caspar Heinemann
Giorgos Tigkas
Works from the collections of Erling Kagge and Alexander Schröder
nervi delle volpi
Genoa
11.10.–22.11.2025

Ports of Entry

Ancient and modern port cities like Genoa, with an open flank facing the rest of the world, invite exchanges. Winds, tides, trade and conflicts—even ambition and madness—govern incessant comings and goings. There is exploration and commerce, but also exploitation and expropriation, or a troubling mixture of these. Distant shores come into correspondence. Improbable things, whose origins surprise, meet on the surface, where flotsam and jetsam commingle.

Nervi delle volpi’s latest exhibition—the third since the room’s inception and inauguration last year—evokes the restlessness of this context like an incantation. Less a group exhibition with an agenda than a coming together of personages and aesthetically divergent totems and wares, the endeavour invites both repartee and contemplation. When a person looks at art, they internalise something hitherto foreign. Contemporary art often issues forth with bold, youthful confidence from the standpoint of a subjective present to address the demanding now. Meanwhile, our shared moment is just a flicker on the crest of tidal waves rippling across waters set in motion on a cosmological scale.

The group exhibition features the participation of Norwegian-born explorer, publisher, author, philosopher, lawyer, entrepreneur, and art collector Erling Kagge. Kagge is concurrently presenting the Italian-language edition of his latest book, The North Pole: The History of an Obsession (2025), in collaboration with the Palazzo Ducale Foundation and its director Ilaria Bonacossa. Since the 1990s, Kagge has tested his limits of endurance at both the North and South Poles, on the summit of Mount Everest, and even in the underbelly of New York City. Thinking of explorers: although Genoa was responsible for launching Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), already much earlier Venetian Marco Polo (1254–1324), was imprisoned here for three years by his warring Genoese rivals close to the square in front of nervi delle volpi. Rivalry can be a motivator. And art collecting, too, is the pursuit of a receding horizon line.

The exhibition primarily introduces two emerging artists with entirely different points of departure. One commonality between them, however, is that in addressing complex cultural and socio-political issues through art, they do so with an inventive economy of means. Theirs is art that does not speak about something, or down to its audience, and instead manifests an ambiguous threshold between the subjective realm and the world outside.

Glasgow-based artist and writer Caspar Heinemann (b. 1994) is represented by his installation Festival of Light (2022)—a work purchased jointly by Kagge and Schröder—along with a few of his beguilingly handcrafted objects. Festival of Light was first shown at Cabinet Gallery, London, in that establishment’s basement as part of the exhibition Caspar Heinemann: Glorie (2022). The work comprises eight readymade electric “flame-effect” stoves—domestic heaters of various models designed to mimic small glowing log fires—that are placed around the periphery of an otherwise dark room. The installation exerts a warming pull: the fireplace is the most ancient site of gathering, the place where conversation might begin and cheeks redden. Heat illuminates the darkness and, arranged around the room, the work creates a geometry that implicates the viewer in the cosy negative space held in suspense by the work. Reflections of artificial flames climb and dart about the white walls.

Not immediately obvious unless we are told, the work was actually inspired by early 1970s UK Gay Liberation actions that sought to sabotage homophobic, reactionary “Christian” rallies promoted by figures such as media bigot Mary Whitehouse. (Who could have thought that Whitehouse and her ilk’s retrograde lunacy would not remain an embarrassing footnote in history, but flare up again with such grotesque political effect in our troubled present?) Thus in a camp, irreverent fashion, the work evokes theatrical hellfire, which, if it exists, is surely not reserved for veterans of queer communities. But do not be alarmed; the installation also conjures up the sexual solace and personal exploration resplendently on offer in the darkrooms of gay subculture. Sexuality is the force that drives our desire for art encounters, as the surrealists well knew. But now—in the space of the unleashed imaginary and belief beyond bigotry—think of the sacrificial fires of many religions, or of a sublimated burning within and the divine spark of inspiration. No wonder Prometheus’ mythological flesh had to be so elaborately punished by the gods for stealing the flame.

Understandable then, that an artist like Heinemann, representative of a new generation, might need to carve out a parallel world in arrangements of words and unique things of his own making. His background as a poet, and his present role as a reluctant maker of folkish art objects, converge in works such as the nail-adorned, ritualistic wooden panels Bagatelle (Tablet) and Bagatelle (Fudge) (both 2024). Note also Glorie #13 (2022), courtesy of the Kagge collection, one from a series of whimsical cardboard birdhouses decorated with mystic white paint markings, held together with tape and string, but also invites penetration through a makeshift glory hole. In his emerging practice, poetically charged cultural politics taps a vein of transgressive queer—or queer-allied—artistic ancestry, from Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) to Félix González-Torres (1957-1996) and Robert Gober (b.1954), and forward to the present via Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1947-2024), Cady Noland (b.1956), and even Lutz Bacher (1943-2019). In the twenty-first century, it still takes a poet’s formal discipline to rescue—or resuscitate—the cultural resonance and true cultural value of objects otherwise drowning in a sea of banality, or trashed by global capitalism’s bulimic relation to things.

Interfacing with geopolitical realities is a striking work by Giorgos Tigkas (b. 1989; lives and works in Athens). A relative newcomer as a solo artist, Tigkas was, however, a founding member of the collective Serapis Maritime (2014–2023), a hybrid entity that expressed itself through both the fashion industry and contemporary art projects. His solo work, MV Centauri [TEL 3, 4, 6, 7, 54] (2008–2024), comprises audio files of recorded satellite telephone conversations. The installation consists of a mounted playback device with headphones, and a transcript of the log presented in a perfunctory manner. The piece was first shown and encountered by Schröder at the major group exhibition In and Out of Place: Land after Information 1992–2024 (2024) at the Kunstverein Hamburg. The work’s understated formal presentation belies the explosiveness of its content. With headphones in place, the listening viewer can hear the unedited 2008 negotiations between a representative of a shipping company and Somali pirates about the release of a seized vessel.

Experienced from a safe distance from the actual events, the effect is both chilling and haunting. The work is the subject of an additional text provided by the co-curators of the Hamburg exhibition, Milan Ther and Dr Martin Karcher. The legacy of colonialism; the brutality of civil war; illegal toxic waste; organised crime; clan leaders turned warlords; militias and international law; rampant corruption; and the ever-present potential for arbitrary violence are all implicit in the sometimes banal, even strangely cordial, exchanges. While listening, the notion of ‘the rule of law’ seems brittle; a comfortable fiction for some but not for all. In the end, the ransom is agreed upon and paid; the ship is freed; the Filipino sailors saved. The twist is that the skilled negotiator was the artist’s own father.

In the office, reminding us that the recent past remains palpably present in the now, are works by two further artists, serving as art-object-portholes that extend the connective flow and currents of what we have already seen. The pink light work by New York artist Lutz Bacher, Pink Out of a Corner (to Jasper Johns), 1963 (1991), directly quotes predecessor Dan Flavin’s eponymous piece in both title and physical form. The remake’s installation instruction however, require the work to be installed not only in a corner but ‘from the top’. Bacher’s act of theft evokes dense, overlapping layers of art history. Take, for example, Flavin’s quasi-sacred inspirations—he referred to his light works as modern “icons”—and his queer adjacency, personified by Jasper Johns. Like other appropriation artists, such as Bacher’s contemporary Elaine Sturtevant (1924–2014), there is a conscious transfer of aesthetic power at play: a kind of cannibalisation, whereby consuming the art patriarchy might sustain an alternative. Bacher’s belatedly recognised brilliance lies in their ability to emerge alive with imagination intact from a frontal mash-up of consumer culture’s brutal underbelly with the rarefied realm of post-minimalism.

Last but not least, also on display are some examples of Berlin-based artist Ariane Müller’s (b. 1965) fake train ticket series from the early 1990s, including Illegal Travel Documents (Hamburg – Warszawa) (1990–1993). The artist actually used the drawings to travel throughout Europe (thankfully without incident or repercussions) as much for the socially transgressive performance art aspect as out of economic necessity. Müller has long been part of the same circle of artists, thinkers, and cultural producers as Schröder and has been active in Berlin since the 1990s. In parallel, she has also worked for NGOs in the Balkans and Africa. Only recently has her artwork been brought to wider public attention through the solo exhibition at the Secession, Vienna: Fish are folded into the sea just as the sea is folded into fish, 2025. There, the artist combined a series of large-scale canvases in the style of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), together with a video installation documenting many off-space, non-profit, politically motivated projects from the past decades. For Müller, the exhibition arose, in her words, “out of an irritation that seems to shadow my life, or that time and again interrupts my thinking, with something that is actually quite alien to me—and that thing is war.” As the accompanying text observed, “What art can do in a contemporary world in crisis—that is the question that looms in every facet of the exhibition.” This question has not gone away.

—Dominic Eichler, Berlin 2025