Italian artist Elisa Sighicelli is thrilled to present her second solo exhibition at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong: Petits Rats, on view from 20 May through 4 July 2023. The presentation’s title is derived from the nineteenth-century French term les petits rats, which was used to describe young ballerinas-in-training at the Paris Opera. The world and the moving bodies of the dancers inspired many of Edgar Degas’s works, including his iconic bronze sculptures of dancers, seventy-three of which were recently on view in the 2020 exhibition Degas from the permanent collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Sighicelli photographed this assemblage in MASP’s storeroom when the works were in their post-cataloguing state, labels draping alongside their limbs and torsos. With a single source of lighting, these photographs infuse Degas’s works with movement. Deviating from Sighicelli’s past exploration of the materiality of images, this project focusses on the making of image and narrative.

Sighicelli (b. 1968) has been working extensively with sculpture in her photography practice since 2018. To counter the dematerialising of her photographed sculptures, she prints images of ancient works in stone and marble to conjoin the subject shot and the object produced. With a shared materiality, her images meld into their objects, rather than replacing them. Whilst her current practice is still based on the relationship between photography and sculpture, as well as image and object, her focus delves deeper into the relationship between objects.

The artist’s desire to humanise objects started with As Above, So Below (2022). Sighicelli had been commissioned to photograph the sculptural works in the depository of GAM (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) Milano. These sculptures, placed in random proximity, proposed different relationships and dynamics. The artist finds meaning amongst the un-staged sculptures and elicits their dramatic interactions through the combination of specific lighting and careful framing.

At MASP, Sighicelli continued to utilise a single portable light, which she moved around to trace dialogues between the bronze ballerinas. The light emphasizes the plasticity of the wax Degas used to model the sculptures. It also accentuates the materiality of the bronze and its gleam, offering an illusion of malleability to the bodies, thus masking the sculptures with life. The single-source lighting also creates a ‘freeze-frame’ effect which casts a false flow of temporality is upon the sculptures, while the photographs seemingly document the young ballerinas’ movements. Though museum staff arranged the sculptures in random proximity to each other, the bronzes relate to each other as participants in the scenes that Sighicelli captures.

A disorienting narrative arises from these evoked scenes. ‘Through photography, I try to give life to the sculptures’, Sighicelli explains. Photographed in groups, the bronzes shed the stiffness of their material and become humanised with interactivity. Their bodily expressions transform the museum storage space into one that holds the capacity for performance – and the room thus becomes a stage. Yet Sighicelli does not intend to depict an entirely new setting. The locking hinges of the shelving units are kept in the frame, as a reminder of the subtext of the original sculptures, that they represented les petits rats, which often fell victim to manipulation and exploitation.

Just as Degas’s sculptures and paintings, whilst beautiful, serve as a reminder to look behind the curtain, Sighicelli’s images bring us to the ‘backstage’ or ‘side-lines’ of the opera, unveiling a reality in which the youthful ballerinas were, in truth, confined by social perceptions to gender and class. Once this historical point of reference is established, the uneasiness does not fade, as the humanity of the objects aligns with the figures that they represent.