Performance 19.9, 8:30pm
Exhibition 20.9 – 26.10, 2024
LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising is a collaboration between artist Rosa Aiello and actor Dylan Aiello. Building on a lifelong creative collaboration, the siblings stitch together film and live performance to stage the slippery dynamics of testing love, attention-seeking, and pushing past thresholds of social comfort—power plays in search of meaningful connection. This piece is made up of short comic routines, or “Lazzi”, performance units from Commedia dell’Arte theatre used to construct, break into, and unravel plots. Here they serve to destabilise the roles we take on as friends, family, professionals, lovers. LOVE TEST puts a spotlight on the urge to act, to control, to make something happen: it is a variety show, an ecstatic conversation, a road trip, a succession of interruptions, asking “Who is in charge?” The one behind the camera, in front of the audience, the one driving, the one watching?
The original piece was commissioned by Anorak e.V, and premiered at their location in the Green House, Berlin in May 2023. It features film footage by Laura Langer and filmed appearances by Laura Langer, Arianna Calgaro, Leslie Ewen, Victor Jacono, Maya Misfud, Tori Sasso-Briggs, Scarlett Stitt, and Katherine Ward.
In the main space of MINT Rosa Aiello and Dylan Aiello will also be mounting a solo exhibition of new work, a second chapter of LOVE TEST, featuring footage shot this April with their family and community in Lamezia Terme, Calabria. These new video installations experiment with how the gaze functions to delineate belonging, to give rise to connection and to discipline, within groups and between individuals.
Rosa Aiello is an Italian–Canadian artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Berlin. She works in a range of styles from animation to documentary collage to cinematic narrative, as well as architectural installation and photographic series. She takes an experimental approach and uses what is at hand, in her domestic space, in her relationships, on her habitually used streets. She is interested in structures; both social constructs, like the family, and the actual built world, like architecture and city infrastructure. Her works have been shown at numerous international art venues, including Fridericianum, Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Zurich, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, ICA London, Anorak e.V, Kevin Space, Cittipunkt, and SculptureCenter.
Dylan Aiello is an Italian–Canadian actor, theatre maker, and performance artist based in London. He works with physical improvisation and flow-state composition techniques drawing widely from the traditions of Commedia Dell’Arte, animal transformation, Rudolph Laban, Grotwoski and corporeal mime. He studied at RADA’s MA Theatre Lab, and has worked on numerous original and interpretive pieces showing at Transmission Gallery, CBC Gem, Emily Harvey Foundation, Berghain Main Stage, Berliner Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal and Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Bloomsbury Festival, Soho Theatre London, among others, and collaborating with directors such as Euripides Laskaridis, Lesley Ewen, and Juri Nael. Creating community and leading transformation workshops is one of the central strands of Dylan’s artistic practice. He founded the movement community PUMPKING and has continued to bring groups of people together to move and grow.
In collaboration with ABF Stockholm
