Born in Switzerland
Scattered Hijab - The Jeweled Net of Indra
Marie-José d’Aprile is a contemporary visual artist. Her medium of expression and art forms include ceramics, sculptures, installation work and photographs. She was born in Switzerland from an Italian father and a Spanish mother. After spending more than 15 years of her professional career in an international organization, in 2019 she took a leap of faith when moving to Italy with her husband. What had been an intimate artistic work had by then become an urge to express herself as an artist. Since then, she explored her own being artist, shedding away layers of identity, searching for her own language, with the mere intent to spark emotions with her artwork. Since 2021, her artwork has been shown at the Galleria Ramo, in Como. In 2021 she took part in the collective exhibition “Afrodite, Dea Alchemica” at Ischia and in 2022 in the Matres Festival at Vietri. In January 2023, she was part of the collective exhibition curated by Mustafa Sabbagh at Lugano, Switzerland. In April 2023, she took part in the Artquest artistic challenge “30works30days” in London. She is featured in “The WonderLakeComo Guide2023”. In September 2023, she took part in the art exhibition of the Lake Como Design Week.
“Scattered Hijab” is a photograph of a Hijab sculpture that was purposefully scattered into pieces- to bear witness of the evolutionary leap of the freedom movement embodied by women in Iran. What is happening in Iran, and not only, is a decisive crossroad between what was,what is, and what is to become. Time has come for change. I took a series of photos of my sculpture in a trance like state, knowing I was capturing something beyond myself. The photograph bears witness to the threshold, the invisible line that has been crossed. It captures the liminal space between what was and what is unfolding, evanescent memory of a myth that has collapsed and the space it creates for the new. A new breath for the world. It conveys the quality, the essence of what is happening. This Photograph is part of a future installation work.
The Jeweled Net of Indra
Searching what a self-portrait meant to me, I started casting masks on my face despite my fear of masks. Themasks are not perfect, not alike either. Still, they speak to me, reveal what is visible and what is not. The importance is in the process: seeing what does not want to be seen, showing what owes to be shown. This too becomes part of the artwork: The Jeweled Net of Indra reflects the visible and the invisible, that you want or do not want to be seen. “This is a universe in which each point is the center, and in which we find the whole universe within each point. When viewed this way, there is no longer the illusion of a separate self and we cease trying to escape” The Mirror of Yoga, Richard Freeman.