PERFECT STRANGERS IN SEARCH OF ELSEWHERE

PERFECT STRANGERS IN SEARCH OF ELSEWHERE

 

Exhibition Dates: October 21 – November 16, 2025  Tuesday - Saturday 14:00 - 19:00 

Opening: October 21, 2025  18:00

Venue: AAIE Center for Contemporary Art, Rome

Curator: Mariano Cipollini

 

Curated by Mariano Cipollini, Perfect Strangers in Search of Elsewhere brings together the works of artists Liao Junwei and Armando Gioia in an encounter that is at once unexpected and deeply resonant. At the heart of Cipollini’s curatorial vision is the desire to create spaces where aesthetic practices become sites of philosophical inquiry—spaces where unfamiliar voices can speak to one another across cultural and geographic distances.

 

Though the two artists have never met, Cipollini identifies in their works a shared urgency: a need to reconstruct identity in a fragmented world, and a longing to reach toward what lies beyond immediate experience. The exhibition does not propose harmony, nor force thematic unity; instead, Cipollini choreographs a constellation of difference—what he calls an “intellectual and emotional adjacency”—in which each artist’s language retains its autonomy while contributing to a larger collective reflection.

 

The exhibition unfolds during Rome Art Week (October 20–25, 2025), a context Cipollini consciously integrates into the curatorial strategy. By situating this dialogue within a broader cultural network, the exhibition amplifies its reach and challenges the conventional rhythms of gallery time. It becomes a public gesture: an offering to a city already immersed in the multiplicity of contemporary voices.

 

In Liao Junwei’s work, Cipollini reads a metaphysics of matter—clay, canvas, and monochrome palette become instruments of resistance against the void. Her vision, steeped in a naturalist symbolism, constructs a kind of parallel world where life and form converge into a quiet, sustained tension.

 

Armando Gioia’s work, on the other hand, is rooted in what Cipollini terms an “aesthetics of absence.” Through ceramic, wood, and metal, Gioia stages a mythic topography where memory and material coalesce. Cipollini’s curatorial reading emphasizes the generative quality of Gioia’s losses—how they are reimagined through narrative into architectures of resilience and renewal.

 

The curatorial framework resists oversimplification. Cipollini deliberately avoids imposing a didactic structure. Instead, he proposes the exhibition as an open diagram—one that maps out the relational possibilities between two distinct practices united by their search for elsewhere. The works do not illustrate a theme; they inhabit a condition.

 

As Cipollini suggests, this elsewhere is not an escapist utopia but a conceptual and affective terrain—a speculative site where the self is reconfigured, and the other can be encountered anew. Perfect Strangers in Search of Elsewhere is thus not only an exhibition; it is a curatorial proposition, a philosophical invitation. It calls upon the viewer to enter a space of slow looking and careful listening, where matter and meaning, imagination and memory, self and other, are allowed to unfold.

 

In a moment marked by acceleration, alienation, and fragmentation, Cipollini’s curatorial practice reaffirms the power of contemporary art to create provisional zones of connection. Here, in the quiet friction between two strangers, a different kind of understanding becomes possible.