For her February 2020 exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa, “Vanessa’s,” Marie Angeletti presented a new body of work, the aftermath of several conversations with a group of women who had responded to an ad the artist posted on Craigslist Berlin in 2019. The artist had recently had her first arousing experience of viewing pornography. Her ad read: “Female photographer looking for nude females to be photographed. 40 euros an hour.” Angeletti then met with several women who had responded to the ad, and in person, she explained to them that she wanted to film them masturbating – they all agreed.

The exhibition presented the images of these women whom Angeletti hired – including several of the unsolicited photographs that these women sent to Angeletti during their initial email correspondence, including this photograph of Michi. Other images are photographs and film stills which the artist took during their time together.

Angeletti and the women she collaborated with were in control of how they would represent themselves – and by chance, there is no overt nudity in these images. All works are titled with the name of the woman pictured. With their permission, Angeletti has presented these images as the result of her unique experiences with each woman, a transaction by which she wrote “all of us will have gained as well as lost something in the process.”

Angeletti’s work has been featured at many institutions, including Le Consortium, Dijon; Kunstverein Cologne, and Dusseldorf; Kunsthalle Bern; Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris, and others. Her next major solo presentation is planned to take at the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva in 2021.

More information on Marie Angeletti is available at www.carlosishikawa.com.