Following her four months residency at the studio of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Nelly Haliti will show at the Project Space 3 moments, an exhibition including three works that evoke moments and specific spaces in close relation to each other. 3 moments is structured around three different states: destruction, transition and reconstruction. I wanted to put forward the interlocking of different temporalities and the coincidences that can result from this overlapping.

The great empire of Tivoli, 2013
Color film, projected on the dome, 24 x 30 cm
“When the house I had been living in and working on my projects for 5 years was demolished, the choc was greater than I had expected. I documented the destruction through photographs. These images show the main structures of the building, they appear as a sort of sculpture: The great empire of Tivoli. Every empire – even the smallest – is bound to transformation. The building bore the name of the villa-as large as a city – that Emperor Hadrien had built near Rome.”

16 years, 2013
Color film 16 mm, two projections, each 8′, music by musician d’incise 16’ (digitized archives from 1971-74)
“In the house I then moved into and hadn’t really chosen, I found boxes full of negatives, plans, and rolls of film that had been left there. The plans were for a boat and the images showed the departure of a journey on the sea. I projected myself in this other life, as a way of escaping mine, and revealing my own desires. What reasons could have led a man to abandon these precious documents?”

Dôme, 2013
Structure made of fir wood, 5m in diameter and 2,605m in height.
“Using the CAC’s studio as a sort of refuge that I could work in, I wanted to build a house in it. A dome of a surface identical to that of the studio seemed to me the natural evolution from the lemon pyramid with which I ended my studies. A recurrent motif in architecture discovered in the ancient Near East and introduced in the West during the Renaissance, the dome reappeared in 1947 in Richard Buckminster Fuller’s architecture in a geodesic form. The extremely stable structure bears its own weight and its different parts are all indispensable. It represents either a living space or the studio, evoking its own building process.”

77
Offset edition, 77 pages, 100 copies, numbered, Miami books, Genève, 2013
“The book entitled « 77 » will be presented on the opening night as the achievement of a year’s work on the lemon motif. The book displays 77 offset plates on which I worked using chemical products for negative images.
Each plate was printed and its colours modified during the printing process. Ending with a text by David Lemaire, Doctor in Art History, the book offers a journey through forms and colours.”