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Buckets, bowls, shoes, clothing… photographs of loved ones in familiar places. Some items basic and utilitarian, others touchingly intimate and personal.

You will find these objects in any home in any part of the world. They provide the archaeological traces that expose our emotional ties, the secrets of our circumstances, and most importantly, our memories.

In Italian artist Paolomaria’s hands, they also raise a fascinating intellectual dichotomy.

Namely, what happens when the mundane and intimate are laid bare with all their vulnerabilities to the expectations of the collective?

We share so many of these universal remnants, and yet – when we see them in the formalised context of an exhibition - their connection to people we have never met makes them somehow distant to us. How are we supposed to see them? With the subjective affinity of familiarity? Or with the objective distance of the dispassionate observer? Are we intruding? Are we identifying? Or are we analysing?

Taking any of these approaches turns out to be strangely disturbing, but it is what makes Paolomaria’s Sine Voce exhibition so utterly compelling.

Through his engagingly stark installation work, he speaks in a unifying visual language that homogenizes the broad themes of time, memory, dispossession and loss. Yet, despite the inherent conceptual contexts and strikingly uncompromising executional details, we cannot escape the emotional links to our own lives.

By revealing his gallery of ambiguous pasts, Paolomaria also makes us aware of the recurring themes of our own lives, and reminds us that regret is the worst
memory of all.