Amalia Pica: Private & Confidential at The New Art Gallery, Walsall

Natalie Bradbury

Private and confidential? Natalie Bradbury peels back the seal and peers inside a major exhibition of work by British/Argentinean artist Amalia Pica that parodies and subverts the systems of bureaucracy.

If the pattern currently decorating the walls of one of the temporary exhibition rooms at The New Art Gallery in Walsall looks familiar, it’s probably because it is. 

For her solo exhibition, ‘Private & Confidential’, Argentinian artist Amalia Pica has created a new wallpaper based on a geometric pattern of the type commonly found inside envelopes. At first appearing a straightforward pale blue, on approach the design reveals a repeating small envelope motif. Presented in a room that is empty save from two vacant office chairs, the effect is discomforting: it feels like being sealed inside a giant letter, stripped of its message.

Patterns such as those found inside office envelopes are almost but not quite decorative. Whilst they may differ slightly from envelope to envelope, their function remains the same: to add a layer of privacy, concealing the writing within. Overlaying a central section of the wallpaper on one of the walls, the series Element (envelope security pattern) #1,2,3,4,5 (2019) finds a typology among these patterns. Small details from envelopes are picked out, protruding from the wall in wood. Unlike their original function, to perform a job whilst remaining unobtrusive, they become grotesquely oversized and cartoonish.

Nowadays, receiving a personal, hand-written message through the post has become a rarity. The mail that does drop through the door more often bears ominous tidings from an official source, the exterior signifying the sender even before it’s been opened. The brown envelope from the tax man, the council or the benefits office, the official-stamped envelope from the doctors, or the thin envelope with a window bearing a P45 or P60; these communications normally carry an order, an instruction or a responsibility to act.

The predominance of paper in the exhibition reflects the paper trails in which Pica recently found herself entangled during her application to gain a British passport and, by extension, UK citizenship and voting rights. Born in Argentina, Pica has lived and worked in the Netherlands, exhibited in museums and galleries across the world, and shown at biennials in Venice, Italy and Gwangju, China. Working across a range of media, including sculpture, installation, drawing and performance, her practice often concerns communication, meaning, community and identity, and explores ideas such as the mediation of language, symbol and form through social, cultural and political systems, frequently inviting the participation of the audience.

Although Pica has been based in London for several years, working internationally involves a lot of travel, meaning it has been difficult to prove her residence over long periods of time, and the naturalisation process imposed a year-long restriction on trips abroad. One of the paradoxes of an increasingly digital-focused world is that pieces of paper often remain the only officially valid way in which to prove our existence, where we’re from and where we’ve been. Authorities demand birth, death and marriage certificates, visas and passport stamps, everyday utility bills.

Paper, then, is still the form of the bureaucratic process: something that can be verified, stamped and signed off. Progressing through the series of rooms that make up ‘Private & Confidential’ feels like becoming part of such a process.

The sinister undertones of such systems, and their ability to track every aspects of our lives, is highlighted within the show through a series of sculptures which demonstrate paper’s ability to deceive, conceal and assume the shape of something it is not. At first sight, Private & Confidential (2019) looks like a set of seats or the organic forms of modernist public sculptures rendered in stone. Close up, however, it becomes apparent that their solidity is an illusion: they’re made of a composite of shredded paper waste drawn from the day-to-day functioning of New Art Gallery and mixed with glue and confetti. Their seemingly innocuous form is misleading, too. Each bench resembles an ear when viewed from a certain angle – a reminder that we can never be sure when we are under surveillance (particularly in public spaces) or know who might be listening. It’s also clear that we’re not welcome to sit; these aren’t shapes designed to accommodate a human body or to offer any kind of rest.

Displayed alongside them is Meeting room table configurations (2019). For this work, Pica arranged conference tables in configurations other than those stipulated in the furniture catalogue from which they were sourced, short-circuiting their practical value by placing them in unusable formations. She invited dance students from Walsall College to use the exhibition spaces and furniture during the gallery’s closing hours, culminating in a one-off performance in November. In an exhibition characterised by its emptiness – and attempts at subverting the prescribed uses of places and objects – it seems a missed opportunity that no video documentation of the performance is on display. It would have been good to see these spaces come to life.

The most engaging work in the exhibition is Joy in Paperwork, The Archive (2016), in which the entirety of the largest gallery is filled floor to ceiling with A4 sheets of paper in plastic wallets, pinned to the wall with drawing pins. On each sheet are pictures entirely composed of official stamps, collected by Pica from contacts all over the world. Whatever the language or script of each stamp – Chinese, German, French, Spanish, English, Portuguese – their meaning remains obvious: that something has been filed and is an original or a copy. In this way, the piece suggests that there are some areas of language and bureaucracy which cross national and linguistic borders.

In Pica’s installation, however, the stamps take on new and unexpected configurations: the outline of a person, perhaps, or an explosion of fireworks. The effect looks like a series of doodles – of the type we create subconsciously while killing time on the phone, for example, whilst being passed from department to department and being subjected to corporate hold music. The power of the installation lies primarily in its volume, suggesting an endless and ongoing set of outcomes rather than the limited range stipulated by the stamps themselves; paid, sent, delivered, received, cancelled.

In ‘Private & Confidential’, Pica attempts to tease out interest and fun from the bureaucratic and institutional, and create a space, however small, for rebellion and subversion. She makes something personal and human out of apparatus that seeks to reduce everything to faceless uniformity and automation yet has a very real impact on people’s lives. Whereas a stamp means something has been approved, rejected and judged right or wrong, in Joy in Paperwork Pica opens up other possibilities, suggests there might be alternative results, and allows room for imagination to enter the process.

‘Private & Confidential’ runs at The New Art Gallery, Walsall, until Sunday 2 February 2020.