BRANDON NDIFE & GIANGIACOMO ROSSETTI
On view in The Uncanny House at Casa di Goethe, Rome
March 28–September 3, 2024

In the wake of the recurrent leitmotiv that nourished literary fantasy, fairy tales, horror stories, and artistic creation alike since the early 19th century, The Uncanny House, curated by Ilaria Marotta & Andrea Baccin at Museum Casa di Goethe in Rome, investigates the sense of “unheimlich” within the rooms of the Rome apartment where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived between 1786 and 1788. A place that provides an especially favored locus for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of nostalgia, and its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort are sharpened by the contrast of empty spaces, crevices, chimeras, ghosts, alien spirits, time shifts and voices that creep in. Through the work of eighteen international artists, the house thus becomes a place where ambiguities, obsessive thoughts, and the neurotic folds of the human sphere become apparent.

Gregor Schneider, with the work Odenkirchener Str. 202: Rheydt, elaborates a reflection on the concept of historical removal in the former residence of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; Dora Budor, with traces on the walls, presents a site-specific work made especially for the Casa di Goethe, as does Nico Vascellari, who refers to a story concerning the place that hosts the exhibition: the story of Guido Zabban, a Jewish family father who remained hidden in the mezzanine of the apartment to escape the rounding up of the city by German troops; Rachel Whiteread, in her constant artistic research towards the idea of home, with casts of objects, investigates the phantasmal nature of this space. There are also Max Hooper Schneider’s childhood music box, Mathis Altmann’s doll houses, Ser Serpas’s objects stacked in the attic, Augustas Serapinas’s abandoned windows, Marina Xenofontos’s closed doors, Mélanie Matranga’s yellowed curtains, Caspar Heinemann’s inaccessible treasure chests, Anna Franceschini’s living wigs, BRANDON NDIFE’s manipulated objects, Tomaso De Luca’s insidious traps, Giovanna Silva’s faint signs, Analisa Teachworth’s depths, GIANGIACOMO ROSSETTI’s dark atmospheres, and Lenard Giller’s fickle ghosts.

Curated by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin

For more information, please visit Casa di Goethe's website.