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Pippilotta Yerna (1994) works with hypnotic photography. The artist creates a landscape in which friction is allowed to occur: the viewer is first seduced and then confronted with the emotional charge of the work. In this way, Yerna develops intimate installations in which the different elements enter into dialogue with one another. She seeks to create an environment in which viewer and artwork together form a choreography, with the presentation functioning as a unified whole.
In every series Yerna produces, family serves as a point of departure: each project arises from a new question or observation within this theme. In earlier work, she explored the fear of losing a parent, in relation to her mother. Her work at Prospects centres on her great-aunt, a woman of particular significance to Yerna – remarkable and progressive – who lived to the age of 101.
The triptych, which evokes associations with the sacred, is an ode to Yerna’s great-aunt and to life itself. The central panel references her death in 2025, and depicts the artist and her great-aunt in a pietà. The side panels contain her ashes: physical remnants of memory, existence and life. A glowing 3D print of the great-aunt’s kitchen links domesticity and warmth with contemporary technological possibilities – a contrast that, for Yerna, reflects the arc of her great-aunt’s life. Together, the triptych forms a contemporary act of sanctification: it opens and closes at set times, as if life itself is being returned to the installation.
Written by Kelly-ann van Steveninck