Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts. The Villa Romana Fellows 2022 and intertwined echoes of the Fellows 2023 (Chapter II)

Villa Romana e.V. is pleased to present the second chapter of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, the series of interventions and twofold exhibition featuring the Villa Romana Fellows 2022 Haure Madjid, Jasmina Metwaly, Neda Saeedi, Alexander Skorobogatov, with subtle echoes from the 2023 Fellows: Samuel Baah Kortey, Jessica Ekomane, Diana Ejaita, and Pınar Öğrenci and from the German artists’ house in Florence.

As for the first chapter of this project, Villa Romana finds a suitable temporary home in an artists’ project space rather than in a museum: a space that historically in the city of Berlin has been continuously engaging with pressing social concerns and with the very possibilities of troubling, questioning, and critically tackling our times and contexts – a practice that Villa Romana embraces on an everyday basis, as A House of Mending, Troubling, and Repairing. 

This exhibition and series of interventions functions as an engine of relationships and of connections, multiplied throughout bodies, art pieces, sound echoes, and through cross-references across the history of an institution about to turn 120 years old: the artists’ house Villa Romana. It is a celebration in two chapters of the Villa Romana Fellows 2022 intertwined with echoes of the Fellows 2023 and further resonances from the Florence artists’ house. These two generations of Villa Romana Prize winners lived intense times of institutional transition and transformation, against the backdrop of a world slowly transitioning out of one of the major crises of our times, the pandemic. Their work, their fellowship, and their resilience have materialised into a multidirectional force that we want here to embrace as something greater than the sum of each artist's contribution.

The exhibition ponders forms of togetherness that generate excess, and at the same time sustainability. It articulates modes of reflecting on multiplicity that cannot be explained as a mechanical accumulation or addition of things. How can we account for the extra, the more-than, the greater-than, that situation which is generated when fellows, companions, interdependent beings create something that exceeds the mere addition of those things. This is the alchemy of encounters. The generativity of the spirit of something; that which binds things together what would otherwise fall apart. We believe - and it is our mandate - that Villa Romana is a house and not a museum precisely because it conjures up this sum that is greater than its parts. What makes a community more than an association of people?

The second chapter of the exhibition (4 July – 4 August) presents the work of 2022 Villa Romana Fellows Jasmina Metwaly and Alexander Skorobogatov with echoes by Diana Ejaita and Pınar Öğrenci (Fellows 2023).  

Following the vernissage,  Villa Romana is also pleased to launch the four artist booklets that form the Villa Romana publication of the Fellows 2022. Another sum that is greater than its parts.

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