Careful What You Wish For
DISPLAY
February 8—March 15, 2025
Parma, Italy
DISPLAY
February 8—March 15, 2025
Parma, Italy
Careful What You Wish For builds on an interplay between vulnerability and identity, highlighting how fear and the fragility of human experience shape our understanding of the self. Featuring works by Johan F. Karlsson and Dimitris Tampakis, the exhibition focuses on situations in which control over one’s body, perception, or surroundings appears partial, compromised, or threatened.
In Abysmal (2021), F. Karlsson constructs a submerged tomb shielded from sunlight. The contrast between light and darkness, with black sand absorbing and sunfilm reflecting, draws viewers into a state of self-perception as they gaze into their reflections. In Transition Piece (2021), the artist recreates a spatial condition where a temperature shift evokes a sense of presence. Signs indicating the recent passage of a fleeting “other” suggest a lurking danger. When the two infrared heaters are activated, they subtly generate warmth, functioning as lifelike surrogates for familiar objects.
In Your CEO Is Probably A Psychopath (2021), Tampakis employs a central mechanism built around the loss of bodily control, crafting a fictional, sinister persona shaped by an elegant yet treacherous object of monumental size and sharp edges. Predicated on threats to the body—its dissolution, fragmentation, or usurpation—the work foregrounds vulnerability through scale and material tension.
N.E.T. (2023) features a graphic image of a cannibalized ancient Greek sculpture that recalls deep-seated, instinctual fears, emphasizing cracks on the sculpture’s surfaces caused by religious disputes. Capturing a haunting, upward gaze, D.A. (2025) evokes bodily associations while testing the limits of scale and proximity, while SILPHIO (2023) teases the viewer with fleeting glimpses of their reflection through an aluminium-dissolved mirror that transcends physicality.
Curated by: Dinos Chatzirafailidis
Participating artists: Johan F. Karlsson, Dimitris Tampakis
Installation photography: Antonin Roure, Stathis Mamalakis (editing)
Visual identity: Katerina Milesi
Supported by: KONSTNÄRSNÄMNDEN Swedish Arts Grants Committee
DISPLAY | Vicolo al Leon d'Oro 4/A, Parma, Italy 43121
In Abysmal (2021), F. Karlsson constructs a submerged tomb shielded from sunlight. The contrast between light and darkness, with black sand absorbing and sunfilm reflecting, draws viewers into a state of self-perception as they gaze into their reflections. In Transition Piece (2021), the artist recreates a spatial condition where a temperature shift evokes a sense of presence. Signs indicating the recent passage of a fleeting “other” suggest a lurking danger. When the two infrared heaters are activated, they subtly generate warmth, functioning as lifelike surrogates for familiar objects.
In Your CEO Is Probably A Psychopath (2021), Tampakis employs a central mechanism built around the loss of bodily control, crafting a fictional, sinister persona shaped by an elegant yet treacherous object of monumental size and sharp edges. Predicated on threats to the body—its dissolution, fragmentation, or usurpation—the work foregrounds vulnerability through scale and material tension.
N.E.T. (2023) features a graphic image of a cannibalized ancient Greek sculpture that recalls deep-seated, instinctual fears, emphasizing cracks on the sculpture’s surfaces caused by religious disputes. Capturing a haunting, upward gaze, D.A. (2025) evokes bodily associations while testing the limits of scale and proximity, while SILPHIO (2023) teases the viewer with fleeting glimpses of their reflection through an aluminium-dissolved mirror that transcends physicality.
Curated by: Dinos Chatzirafailidis
Participating artists: Johan F. Karlsson, Dimitris Tampakis
Installation photography: Antonin Roure, Stathis Mamalakis (editing)
Visual identity: Katerina Milesi
Supported by: KONSTNÄRSNÄMNDEN Swedish Arts Grants Committee
DISPLAY | Vicolo al Leon d'Oro 4/A, Parma, Italy 43121