Gennifer Deri

Decrypt for-mat#1
photographic Print on Fine art paper, dibond, wood frame
2x 80 cm x 90 cm x 3 cm

Gennifer Deri

Gennifer Deri, with her distinctive photographic piece “Decrypt for-mat#1,” presents an avant-garde perspective that transcends the traditional confines of photography and contemporary art. This Italian artist from Viareggio challenges visual constructs and societal impositions on body perception, particularly the female form, which has been historically entwined with desire and vanity.

“Decrypt for-mat#1,” a diptych that employs photographic print on fine art paper, encapsulates Gennifer Deri’s philosophical inquiry into the body as a societal construct. Deri’s work, framed and displayed, invites a dual interpretation – one that acknowledges the body as both a subject and a vessel of meaning. In her depiction, form is both deconstructed and reconstructed, prompting a reflection on the ‘format’ of how bodies are represented and perceived.

Deri’s artistic narrative is a critical dialogue on self-perception and identity, challenging viewers to reconsider their own biases and the lens through which they view reality. Her work, thus, does not simply capture an image; it serves as an active agent for ideological and perceptual transformation, urging viewers to free themselves from the ‘envelope’ of conventional imagery and explore a sexually undifferentiated subjectivity.

“Decrypt for-mat#1” is a profound contribution to the Salon de Refusées, embodying the exhibition’s theme by defying traditional rejections and engaging in a broader conversation about the boundaries of art and the interpretation of the human form. 

With my artistic work, I have always tried to show people a new way of seeing reality, a new image even of body-space; but above all, a new way of conceiving photography. For this reason I have very often been seen as “peculiar” or “rejected,” because both the image inside the frame and very often the irregular shape of my photographic works and installations are seen by the art world as strange things, breaking with the very idea of photography.

Is it photography or contemporary art?

I think that in the face of a fluid society, art also has to be fluid, and you have to break down preconstituted patterns.

Infact with Decrypt for-mat is an attempt to get people to question their self-perception, to question their identity and to consider the fact that there is no objective perception of reality but we signify it according to what is our educational-cultural background. The issue as Beau Lotto explains, is that we think we see but for the most part we see through visual constructs induced by the society we live in and its history, perceptual automatisms that we incorporate into our self and that we begin to perceive as really ours and our thinking. One of these great induced monsters is precisely the non perception of the body, because society has always shown the body, in most cases female, linked to a sphere of desire and vanity, giving it a negative meaning that transposes it into a hidden dimension, but paradoxically if it is shown it is inscribed in a context intended for a certain male audience.

The ambiguity of the image, the double reading it carries within itself, has been from the very beginning one of the characterizing elements of my artistic research: “the image of the body” becomes “the body of the image,” just as the “space of the body” becomes “the body of the space,” the form becomes in this case a deformation that “in-forms” the observer of the existence of a possible other vision of the self. Similarly, Decrypt for-mat means “decrypting the matter” but also “decrypting the format,” not unlike writing where words change in meaning as other words or discursive contexts are placed side by side. Thus I reinvent a communicative system in which body image functions just like words, as an expedient to initiate a dialogue that becomes continuous between viewer and work.

— Gennifer Deri