Elisa Giardina Papa
“U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale
03.10.–30.11.25
Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale (still), 2022
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner. (c) Elisa Giardina Papa
Exhibition view, Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Exhibition view, Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
left and right: Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Poem Fragments., 2025.
center: Elisa Giardina Papa, Braid #7. She was a thief of mother’s milk., 2023.
Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. From l-r: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Private Collection Berlin.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
left: Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Poem Fragments., 2025.
right: Elisa Giardina Papa, Braid #7. She was a thief of mother’s milk., 2023.
Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. From l-r: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Private Collection Berlin.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Exhibition view, Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
front: Elisa Giardina Papa, Braid #8. She could make a sardine head speak., 2023.
back: Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Poem Fragments., 2025. Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale. Poem Fragments., 2025.
Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Elisa Giardina Papa, Braid #8. She could make a sardine head speak. (Detailansicht), 2023.
Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Elisa Giardina Papa, Moldy Lemons, 2025.
Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Produced with kind support of KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen e. V..
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Elisa Giardina Papa, Moldy Lemons, 2025.
Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Produced with kind support of KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen e. V..
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, 2022. Installation view, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner.
Photo: Gabriela Valdespino
Opening: October 2, 7 pm
With “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, Künstler:innenhaus Bremen presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Italian artist Elisa Giardina Papa (1979, lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily). The artist works with film, drawing, and ceramics to explore how hegemonic demands for order and legibility strain radical forms of knowledge, desire, and embodiment.
Her works – including large-scale video installations, sculptural objects, and AI-based projects – create spaces for reflecting on the shaping and regimentation of collective memory and histories. The starting point of “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale is the Sicilian myth of the donne di fora: ambivalent, supernatural female figures who carry ancestral forms of healing, as well as histories of persecution, magic, and resistance.
Giardina Papa stages these mythological figures as queer allegories for a fluid identity rich with transformative potential beyond rigid categories. The exhibition weaves together personal memories, speculative history, and archival research to form a poetic-political space where the magical and the disorderly emerge as creative forces. Amid braided ceramic hair, moldy lemons, and subversive bike-tuners in a utopian abandoned Sicilian town, the exhibition conjures memories of resistance and new perspectives on history, belonging, and potential futures.
Curator: Marie Oucherif
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02.10.25 19 pmOpening: Elisa Giardina Papa
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03.10.25 3 pmIN CONVERSATION with Elisa Giardina Papa
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16.10.25 6 pmGuided Tour with Clara Kramer
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23.10.25 6 pmPublic Guided Tour in Turkish with Elfin Açar
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09.11.25 3-6 pmCan Art Convey Art?
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13.11.25 6 pmCurator's Tour with Marie Oucherif
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15.11.25 11 am- 2.30 pmFLINTA* Skateworkshop
