Johan F. Karlsson & Dimitris Tampakis, Careful What You Wish For at DISPLAY, Parma

Careful What You Wish For by Johan F. Karlsson & Dimitris Tampakis, curated by Dinos Chatzirafailidis, at DISPLAY, Parma, 08.02.2025 – 15.03.2025.

The exhibition Careful What You Wish For builds on an intricate interplay between vulnerability and identity, highlighting how fear and the fragility of human experience shape our understanding of self. By examining psychological dimensions of existence, the exhibited works invite viewers to confront unseen forces influencing perception and interaction. This exploration prompts reflection on the nature of bodily autonomy and the complexities inherent in navigating the boundaries between self and other.

In Abysmal (2021), Johan F. Karlsson constructs a submerged tomb shielded from sunlight. The contrast between light and darkness, with black sand absorbing and sunfilm reflecting, draws viewers into a state of self-perception as they gaze into their reflections, grappling with elements that challenge existential stability. In Transition Piece (2021), the artist recreates a spatial condition where a temperature shift evokes a sense of presence. Signs indicating the recent passage of a fleeting “other” suggest a lurking danger. When the two infrared heaters are activated, they subtly generate warmth, functioning as lifelike surrogates for familiar objects, recontextualized within their original state.

In Your CEO Is Probably A Psychopath (2021), Dimitris Tampakis employs a central mechanism built around the fear of losing control over one’s body. By crafting a fictional sinister persona shaped by an elegant yet treacherous object, the artist challenges humans’ innate need to remain alert to bodily harm in their immediate environment. With its monumental size and sharp edges, the work is predicated on threats to the body: its dissolution, fragmentation, or usurpation. N.E.T. (2023) features a graphic image of a cannibalized ancient Greek sculpture that recalls deep-seated, instinctual fears. Tampakis emphasizes the cracks on the sculpture’s surfaces, caused by religious disputes, urging a confrontation with the historical continuum of violent tendencies. Capturing a haunting, upward gaze, D.A. (2025) evokes bodily associations, while testing the limits of scale and proximity. Meanwhile, SILPHIO (2023) teases the viewer with fleeting glimpses of their reflection through the allusive form of an aluminium dissolved mirror that transcends mere physicality.

The two artists’ shared attention to the uncontrollable and the irrational fosters a psychologically charged encounter grounded in a profound exploration of collision. This is achieved through formal or stylistic variants and affective patterns, such as utilizing minimal perceptual cues or mediating heightened immediacy. Throughout the exhibition, affect arises in the midst of in-betweenness, in the capacities to act and be acted upon. By simultaneously playing off different modes of engagement, while addressing the spectator directly, all elements merge to support a constructed narrative, inducing an air of unease and probing primal aspects of the ego.