Bianca Bondi

"For the past two months, Bianca Bondi, 35, has transformed a room at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Boulogne into a place of meditation, powdered in pink from floor to wall. The South African artist has installed basins of salt water, adding fountain shells and bird bones to the fountain "as a gesture of thanks to the gods", she explains, with a new-age accent. In the air, a powerful smell of earth and grass lingers, "to help with meditation", says the artist, who is passionate about the living world and the properties of minerals. At the Mor Charpentier gallery in Paris, where she has a simultaneous exhibition, Bondi stages found objects and plants that she has crystallized with salt, as if "washed of their past waves".

The presence of occult themes in her work are the result of generational influences, growing up in the nineties. "I grew up with Charmed (the story of three sisters descended from a line of witches in San Francisco) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer", admits Bondi, who, at the age of 10, founded her first witch group – she would later create two others. On Instagram, the keyword “witch” returns more than 16 million post results, while spell tutorials are spreading on TikTok".

"Who are the "young up and comers" shaping the art of our time? Each month, Beaux Arts spotlights the career of an emerging artist worth following closely. Currently exhibited at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Bianca Bondi creates, in collaboration with musicians, perfumers and florists, sublime visual, olfactory and audio environments... filled with magic.

There is a good chance that, like us, visitors to the last Lyon Biennial in 2019 will remember Bianca Bondi's (b.1986) installation perfectly. The location was complex, however: a small room lost in a corner of an immense Fagor factory, whose past left a mark on the exhibition (before its closure, production had been gradually relocated, leaving hundreds of workers unemployed). Still sensitive after emerging from her own painful ordeals, Bianca Bondi had asked on visiting the site to meet with former workers before setting to work, but without success. She then produced a piece with a palpable protective aura, covering the surfaces of this former break room with salt, installing various objects here and there (a cup, jars), themselves imprisoned in a crystalline layer. "Salt keeps out bad vibes, protects, creates a space and a sacred air.”

The whole thing seemed petrified in the ice, like a piece of life kept intact through the years. Petrified, but not really, since it was also obvious that the installation was alive, of slowly metamorphosing, and acting... In fact, salt absorbs humidity and toxins, explains the artist, who has been handling it since childhood. In a setting as noxious as these old factories (water cannot be drawn from within a seven-kilometre radius such an installation played an active role, purifying the air and the soil as the days went by. This is what the former workers, whom she had so wanted to see earlier, told her when they came to visit the Biennial; that her installation did them good, that it echoed their lives by occupying the break room where they used to take a breath of fresh air before going back to the line."

"Born in Johannesburg, Bianca Bondi is one of the latest artists selected by the [N.A!] She will soon be exhibited in Tarbes and South Korea.

Bianca Bondi loves nothing more than the challenges offered by institutional exhibitions or biennials. This dedicated environmentalist can experiment, on a large scale, with materials that consistently evolve, that nurture a reflection on time. "I use a lot of vegetation, especially medicinal plants," she explains, "which attests to the fragility but also the strength of the fauna and flora, which always reclaims its rights. Then I work with salt, copper, latex, silk... with objects found at markets, related to each site. Within a trend hailed as the archaeology of the future, her immersive vanities willingly summon synesthesia. "Because a work is not only what you see, but what you feel", continues Bianca Bondi, who sometimes chooses to appeal to the viewer's sense of smell or to impose a particular relationship to sound, transfixing it in an eerie manner.

If her first pieces referenced sculpture’s history¬ – and Robert Morris' Antiforme – she was equally fascinated, at a very young age, by the freedom of Marina Abramović's experiments. When Bondi arrived in France in 2006, she established herself as one of the pioneers of feminist ecology. The heritage of her native country is felt in her art. Having been raised on stories of spiritualism and magic, she retains an occult and earthly vision of the world, while being perfectly of her time. The subject of ritual remains fundamental, when she debates the political ecology of objects or the colonial view of geology. Skillfully orchestrated, Bianca Bondi's after-hours work is supported by a great deal of research, which gives each project its own distinction while weaving its own memory."