This gallery stands at number thirty-two on a street where there is no thirty. Inspired by this infrastructural slippage, the duo known as Kings have transformed the address into Dancing30, announced by a neon sign at the building’s entrance. Detourning the space into a phantom nightclub, the artists, Daniele Innamorato and Federica Perazzoli, evoke those glittering days of disco, or simply dancing, as we called it when we were young. As with any good discotheque, the show mixes high and low: Kings have recycled imagery from the books Max Ernst used for his collage novel Semaine de Bonté (1934), reproductions of famous works of modern design, and pages torn from erotic Italian magazines from the 1960s. Perhaps alluding to this tendency to ape the images of others, some walls have been papered with repeating vertical rows of a monkey’s magenta head, itself a playful homage to Warhol’s bovine prints. Elsewhere, a silver Mylar curtain provides the backdrop for the neon phrase “Wanna Dance,” which reads less as a question than a declaration of pent-up desire after months of lockdown. Music fills the lower level, bathed in the electric glow of another wish: “Cigarettes after Sex.” In addition to these tantalizations, the pair has dreamed up a past of sinful amusements experienced by anonymous patrons of their elegant, illusory non-address. These are documented in written correspondence, itself a noirish collage of sex, betrayals, and tragic epilogues.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
