Rossella Biscotti
Green Art Gallery is pleased to present Centrifugal Time, Rossella Biscotti's first solo exhibition in the Gallery. The show brings together two new installations produced for the gallery, Centrifugal Gravity and The Man Who Walks Backwards (2026); early video portrait Cesar (2001); and Lucy (2026), a neon work commissioned for the 16th Gwangju Biennale. It follows her participation in Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025, where the installation Saturated Salty Mud Stories traced the movement of materials and resources across the Gulf.
At the centre of the exhibition lies Centrifugal Gravity, an installation of spherical sculptures in textile and concrete, previously produced at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne in 2018. Redeveloped site-specifically in Dubai, the spheres are conceived as elements in motion, dispersed across the gallery floor as though scattered or rolled. Each holds garments gathered locally since February 2025 through direct exchange, in particular conversations and negotiations.
The garments operate as a system of signs. Working clothes, symbolic pieces, everyday wear, items tied to a moment in someone's life: they tend to show how a person positions themselves within social spaces. As so often in Biscotti's practice, the body is absent yet structurally present. What remains visible is the imprint of use, held in place by concrete. A material of mixing and compression, it holds these disparate elements together and partly conceals them, working simultaneously as container and agent of transformation. A growing city does something similar, absorbing and reorganising the materials, bodies, and desires that pass through it. Conceived in relation to Dubai, the installation reads the city less as a form than as a set of encounters, where meaning builds up through proximity and friction.
Where the spheres compress and contain, The Man Who Walks Backwards pulls and extends. The title comes from an old dialect term for rope makers, whose craft required them to walk backwards to twist fibres into rope. Progress here is achieved by moving in reverse. For Biscotti, the figure, which is also directly connected to her family's labour lineage, becomes an image of labour and social construction. Making rope relies on tension and repetition, and production unfolds in a temporality in which past, present, and future are braided together. The work is set in the typeface Arial (1982), a font designed for the standardisation and circulation of information in late twentieth-century digital environments. It brings together different temporalities of technology, from the manual twisting of fibres to the modern systems through which language itself is distributed. In Dubai the figure of the worker carries a particular charge. The work does not illustrate labour conditions; rather, it proposes labour as a structural principle, the ongoing entanglement that underlies the construction of the city and its social fabric.
Cesar (2001) is the first in a series of video portraits, made in the aftermath of one of Argentina's worst economic crises. At the very start of her career, during a foreign exchange program in Spain, Biscotti used a borrowed camera to film a friend, a young Argentinean electrician who had emigrated to Valencia. The camera records an unscripted action in a domestic setting. The young man stands still and silent for 14 minutes, then begins to sing "Inconsciente colectivo" by Charly García, a song that took on political weight after the collapse of Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship in 1983. The viewer's gaze becomes an intrusion on an everyday moment already underway. The work speaks of the vulnerability carried by those forced to leave everything behind.
The exhibition closes with a second portrait, Lucy (2026), a handmade glass-tube neon, depicting a portrait of one of our earliest known ancestors: the 3.2-million-year-old fossilised skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, often described as a "missing link" in the evolution of upright bipedal humans. The work shifts attention from abstract scientific narrative to femininity as an overlooked quality and ancient power, and to the changes and adaptations through which bodies have learned to stand, move, and endure. When Biscotti began the piece, the skeleton was on loan to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi from the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, the nature and duration of the loan unknown. The fragility of our shared heritage, who has access to it, and how it circulates thus became part of the work. Shown in a time of distress, Lucy sets the present against a far longer measure. Looking back 3.2 million years, this Lucy glows electric red, asking us to imagine what futures and capacities may still lie ahead.