The Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, New Delhi is happy to announce the participation of Claire Fontaine’s Foreigners Everywhere at the India Art Fair 2025.
Claire Fontaine’s Foreigners Everywhere, curated by the Director of the Italian Cultural Centre Andrea Anastasio, features multilingual neon sculptures weaving South Asian influences across New Delhi.
The series of neon signs Foreigners Everywhere in several main Indian languages, English and Italian is conceived as a work that establishes with its environment a sort of symbiosis. These neon signs – exactly like foreigners, like displaced people – don’t have a place of their own: the ambivalence of their meaning reacts with the different sites and contexts where they are placed. The signs stress that we can feel like foreigners wherever we go but also that we will find foreigners in every place so the translations of the two words act as subtitles to public or private spaces, awaking dormant antagonisms and fears. The reactions of the public in past presentations of some of these signs in public spaces have been various and sometimes very vigorous, which we think is very interesting and a sign of vitality of the artwork.
The work highlights immigration and emigration as existential experiences rather than mere economic phenomena, portraying exile as a universal condition tied to a world governed by often incomprehensible logic. Claire Fontaine’s use of multiple languages interrogates the violence in translation, where the foreigner must submit to another language, risking cultural colonization. This struggle reveals buried contradictions and power dynamics, creating what Deleuze and Guattari described in Kafka’s work: a foreign language within language.
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