Installation Views

Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea is pleased to present In The Half Light / Forms of Apparition, the first solo exhibition by Nicol Vizioli in the gallery’s spaces.

A new body of work shaped by an exploration of diverse media, including photography, video, and, introduced here for the first time, the material presence of bronze sculpture.

Photography, the medium through which Vizioli has developed much of her research, appears here in a radically different form. Drawing on early photographic processes and the use of elemental, ancestral materials, the artist constructs a body of work grounded in experimentation and in a profound engagement with the intrinsic conditions of the medium.
Each piece is singular, unique, and irreproducible.

Part of the work was developed during a winter residency in Iceland, under extreme conditions where daylight lasted only three hours and never reached full brightness. Suspended in near-constant twilight, the landscape took on a muted, almost lunar atmosphere.

Vizioli translates this absence of light into an unfamiliar presence that nonetheless acquires physicality and density. Blurred vision, a lack of clarity, become a space of heightened perception, where faint glimmers emerge and apparitions seem possible. In this sense, the environment becomes a metaphor for how we encounter the world through intuition, memory, and other non-visual forms of knowledge.

Exploring ideas of suspended narrative and transience, Nicol Vizioli engages the idea of a transversal existence, revealed through a series of life-size photographs produced in the darkroom using liquid emulsion. These works represent the image as physical event unfolding in darkness: visible brushstrokes and deliberate imperfections emphasize a desire for tangibility, preserving the trace of a human presence. They further explore the tension between presence and absence, permanence and decay.

A further group of photographs, treated with the encaustic technique and sealed in wax, assume an almost devotional quality, evoking relics or icons. As their visibility is softened and blurred, they conjure a suspended, surreal space in which physical boundaries fade.

Alongside the photographic works, Vizioli presents, for the first time, a series of sculptures.
Cast in bronze using the traditional lost-wax process, they function as devotional relics, somehow archaeological and sacred, suggesting the lingering trace of a presence or memory: a spirit, a friend, or a god that has come and gone.
Wax is a central element throughout the exhibition, binding the works through a shared language of transformation, preservation, and trace.

Finally, the two videos work attempt to render the invisible perceptible. Slow, intimate projections animate a liminal, dimly lit space, a quiet environment that invites reflection and attunement.

This interpretive framework opens a space to reflect on the nature of apparition, restoring a sense of estrangement akin to the unexpected return of a presence, or the lingering trace of someone no longer living. The exhibition considers the conditions from which apparitions emerge: darkness, almost supernatural, and solitude as necessary ground for spiritual or emotional encounter.
It is within a state of deep listening, of profound solitude, that one may begin to see, to understand another language.

A Perceptual Zone

Proposition Gallery

London, UK

November 2025

A Perceptual Zone, a month-long exploration of dance in dialogue with the elements. Born from bodies attuning to land, season, and storm, it coalesced in continual contact with the biosphere.

Dance arose from the necessity to respond, moving in step with shifting conditions, shaped by the forces of nature. It was an origin of ecological art: wisdom inscribed in fascia, constellations of movement resonant with animals and elemental intelligences. It proposed an ethics of listening and being-with. It unfolded as a communion with what exceeded the self: the stretch of trees into sky, vibration of soil, pressure of air, gravitational pull of another body. In this reciprocity, rhythm became a living cycle — an environmental intimacy through which the human was re-imagined.

Throughout the month, artists Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Nicol Vizioli, Nissa Nishikawa, Kapila Venu, Lewis Walker, and Yen-Ching Lin offered workshops, installations, film, photography, and performance within the galleries. Their practices, experimental and traditional, were gestures that honoured the earth while remembering dance as both instinct and offering.

For the second week in Gallery I, Nicol Vizioli and Nissa Nishikawa presented Zone I / Zone II, a series of 12 C-Type photographs extended from handmade black and white fibre darkroom prints sourced from their ongoing collaboration of dance-journeys in open-air spaces. In Gallery II, during this same week, a film by Kapila Venu titled Yakshi was screened on continuous rotation. The film held image, landscape, sound and character from the folklore of Kerala. There was a finissage on the Saturday evening with Vizioli and Nishikawa present to discuss their processes.