Luca Asta

Luca Asta

My work looks at personal affiliation to subordination to reflect more directly onto gendered constructs and structures of power.

Luca Asta is a French-Italian visual artist living and working in London. He graduated in 2019 in ‘Contemporary Art Practice’ at the Royal College of Art, with a practice of video, photography, sculpture, writing and performance. Luca Asta’s recent works have been looking at the psychosocial construction of the body, with a specific interest in structural and internalised oppressions. He is actively engaged in dismantling binary and heteronormative oppressions through intimate and confrontational works.

Security Blankets

HD Video / 03:03 min / 2018

Close up shots of alcohol on stainless steel, face clay mask ending with tears and distress expressions, genital cleansing with soap and water, latex and silicone matters on parts of the body, face spit and kiss, computer generated images of liquids and a close up on perfume packaging.

‘Security Blankets’ is a quite abstract mixture of biological and synthetic matter with a latent and non linear narrative going on.

It grows around ideas of cleanliness and purity. The immaculate obsession also goes into clinical perspectives through the obsession of immunity and the fear of contamination. I play with theses ideas of permeability and impermeability, within psychosocial constructs.

MVSEO DELLA CIVILTÀ

HD Video / 04:18 min / 2016

Classical sculptures of balanced shapes expressing the idea of a harmonic beauty but somehow detached are juxtaposed to heels or clinging to the poles of the pole dancing, consciously seeking the eye of the camera. We are offered a fast forward trip from the past till today to discover that the representation of the body and gender is a cultural construction and that today’s identity is something in becoming, more complex than just an opposition between masculine and feminine. Luca Asta’s body of work leaves us with the impression that culturally charged pairs (masculine and feminine, dirt and clean, sacred and profane) have exploded and their fragments are put together again but in a stage of fluid transition. Like suspended particles they are all circulating in the same space waiting for new connections to be drawn.