



There is a certain silence in the work of Clara Ianni—not a still, removed kind of silence, but a rather tense one, like a pregnant pause before a storm erupts. Her work embodies a latent state of violence that creeps to the surface every now and with polished manners rather than aggression. We meet in a warehouse in the south side of São Paulo as night falls. She shares this space with a group of fellow artists whose works, or fragments of them, are strewn about the floor. Hers is a desk in the corner, on which sits a MacBook Air and nothing else. The sparse surroundings look like an old factory gutted and devoid of everything but a hard concrete floor and whitewashed walls. They match her work—bold and brash in content, understated in form.

Still Life or Study for Vanishing Point was the first of her pieces to really strike me. Nine sheets of steel hang on the wall grouped in three parallel rows, three plaques in each of them, forming a grid. One could mistake it for some kind of posthumous Donald Judd was the first of her pieces to really strike me. Nine sheets of steel hang on the wall grouped in three parallel rows, three plaques in each of them, forming a grid. One could mistake it for some kind of posthumous, except it’s pierced by bullets. When she first did this piece four years ago at the Museu da Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte, local police officers were called in to shoot at these skins of metal. Ianni just installed the same piece at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, asking German police contribute to what she calls “an archeology of ammunition.”



