On the occasion of Blood Most Precious, Shahryar Nashat’s solo exhibition on view now at Istituto Svizzero in Rome, the artist sat down with fellow artist Alessandro Di Pietro for a conversation shaped by complicity. Beginning with Nashat’s scenographic, though mostly imperceptible, interventions into the Istituto building, their dialogue expands into a broader reflection on the physical and conceptual transformations that artworks undergo across different contexts. Di Pietro, whose practice navigates speculative fiction, art historical détournement, and the aesthetics of monstrosity, draws out themes of possession, memory, and bodily exchange in Nashat’s work. Together, they explore the fluidity of artistic identity and the ghosts that haunt both of their practices—from “daddy” Paul Thek to cinematic archetypes—as well as the erotics of matter, where desire and decay, presence and absence, continuously reshape the life of an artwork.
ALESSANDRO DI PIETRO
When I traveled to Rome to visit your solo show at Istituto Svizzero, Blood Most Precious, I was met by the curator, Gioia Dal Molin. She introduced me to the exhibition by placing particular emphasis on your initial acts of transforming the space and the lighting, before even starting to discuss the works.
SHAHRYAR NASHAT
The Villa Maraini is so, so heavy in Rococo shenanigans and so out of touch somehow with the contemporary that I had to retrofit its outdatedness before I could begin to imagine what to show.
ALESSANDRO
I like it. Gioia told me about your project precisely through these interventions, such as the light-colored carpet, the cold lighting, and the pink film applied to the windows. As soon as you start looking at the works, and the dialogue between them, these elements become a sort of lens through which to observe—spy on?—them in the rooms. I’d like to ask you: Once the space was altered, what was the first work you installed, or the one you knew would be placed in that specific spot?
SHAHRYAR
Most of the works came from my 2024 show at MASI Lugano, Streams of Spleen. It was a very different exhibition. Same works, different story. At the Istituto, I explore the body as a vessel for liquids, whether it’s a fountain, two mouths exchanging saliva, or the raw presence of a bloody beef carcass. After that, the scenography followed naturally. There is a difference between hanging works and installing a show; I am always more interested in the latter. Being offered a space to make an exhibition should be treated as an opportunity to engage your work with a physical space and context. Too often, artists simply “distribute” their work in the space in a mechanical way: “Here is a six-meter wall. Let’s hang four equidistant paintings.” Do you know what I mean? If you’re not going to play with the space, or challenge it in any way, you may as well just make a PDF.
ALESSANDRO
I agree, and I admit that most of the time (when I can), I spend my budget just for the space [laughs]. Maybe this is a common trait between Virgos and Capricorns?
The feeling I had while visiting your exhibition, primarily thinking of the “character sculptures” Boyfriend.JPEG (2022), Lover.JPEG (2023), and Hustler.JPEG (2024), is that they seem engaged in a slow-motion choreography. The space is the lettuce you’ve prepared for the arrival of the snails. “The 3,” leaving a trail of slime behind them, coming from afar, from other exhibitions, very slowly but in a constant and ineluctable movement that never stops—they transit through the spaces, they don’t settle, they establish a temporary and reciprocal relationship. To the human eye, they position themselves, when in reality they are simply passing through to new relational assets.
SHAHRYAR
It began with a show I did at Gladstone Gallery, New York, in 2022. I titled all the works Boyfriend.JPEG, a name that carried multiple layers of meaning. As sculptures, they exist as physical objects within the exhibition space. JPEG means they are stand-ins for something with an uncompressed original elsewhere in the world. And Boyfriend, of course, pointed to the longing I was feeling at the time.
This act of summoning something not fully there became a recurring modality that I carried through two more exhibitions—Happier Than Ever at David Kordansky, Los Angeles, in 2022, and It’s Not Up to You at Gladstone, Brussels, in 2024—with the same titling convention, Lover.JPEG and Hustler.JPEG. Sometimes, a work from a past series reappeared, but its different title shifted its meaning and reframed its narrative. In Rome, all three are present. Same work, different story, again.
ALESSANDRO
“Same work, different story.” I can’t help but reflect on the fact that artists like you and Paul Thek (whom we both love) guide the life of the works and treat them as “sentient” presences in the new environments where they are placed. For example, Thek’s Death of a Hippie was created in 1967 and initially exhibited by Stable Gallery inside a ziggurat, then at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in an installation titled Ark, Pyramid (1971), presented inside its own transport case, covered by a blanket and onions. Eventually, the work was destroyed, subtracted from the world, but it continues to live through the photographs of it by Peter Hujar, some collages, and the memories of those who loved it, like Mike Kelley, who wrote about it in his text “Death and Transfiguration” (1992).
In your case, talking about the Rome exhibition, I was truly struck by the fact that, in addition to transmuting the same material into new narratives, there were also new traces added to the timeline of the exhibition’s assembly. For instance the video installation Lover (2022) was joined by a second video wall of the same size, situated in a mirror position to the original video. Both videos investigate the body as a vessel from an erotic and clinical-naturalistic point of view: the exchange of fluids in the cropped scenes of pornographic videos in the first, and in the second, the natural pollination cycle of a flower by a bee, and the dripping of plasmapheresis PVC pipe in a medical laboratory. These are two parallel souls but independent works, synchronized with the same soundtrack style, lento-violento. I found this choice truly powerful. What interests me is not the process of subtraction, but of addition—how the new elements build upon the original, creating a layered and evolving narrative. Can you tell me more? I saw it in the evening, if that makes a difference.
SHAHRYAR
Didn’t we agree we wouldn’t talk about “Daddy” Thek? Now that you’ve brought him up, let him be the elephant in the room until I answer your question. Yes, I made the Lover video in 2022. I wanted to work from existing footage—in that case, a few seconds of an OnlyFans clip from @DiscoDick’s account, a self-described “hung, vers, kinky gay in NYC”—and transform it through repetition, gradual reframing, and digital effects. However, I later realized that what truly interested me was revealing the rawness of a simple, intimate gesture: the exchange of saliva from one sex worker’s mouth to another’s. Not just the erotic act, but also the fact that this saliva physically enters the other individual’s body. Hence the second part, which is essentially a POV of the saliva through the digestive tract. (Although putting it into words removes some of its poetics.)
Now then. When Gioia and I decided to show this work in Rome, I immediately knew it was an occasion to do an exercise I had never done before: create a response video that would run simultaneously with Lover, sharing soundtrack and duration. It came from a realization I often have: some things appear to me only after a work is finished, and part of me wishes the piece could still absorb these late-emerging ideas. Instead I manifested it as an appendix, or a set of real-time visual footnotes. I invited Antoine Idier, a political scientist and art theorist, to help expand the theoretical and political dimensions of Lover. We spoke about the social significations of saliva, body fluids in Catholicism, Michel Journiac’s work, how blood in a gay context is still so deeply tied to AIDS, and Marcel Proust’s analogy between pollinating bees and gay sex. These convos sparked ideas for images that broadened the reading of Lover, which remains in and of itself a portrait of that saliva exchange.
ALESSANDRO
You’ve sublimated flesh, the relationships between bodies and their exchanges, as well as the narrative and characterization of your works into a system of “alter egos” within your practice, where Thek emerges as a clear yet elegantly assimilated reference. And yes, I’m a hustler too, so I’m hustling you back into Thek now, LOL 😀
SHAHRYAR
Yes, yes, Thek. It’s true we share a common love for him. I see him as an antiestablishment figure who created work that was both deeply personal and political. Don’t get me wrong, he was a hustler and very career driven despite his outsider status. But he wasn’t afraid to go wherever his practice led him. Bruce Hainley recently showed me paintings Thek did in the later years of his career. Paintings of birch trees. They are so ghostly in contrast to his visceral Technological Reliquaries (1964–67). You’d never think it was the same artist. That kind of artistic freedom is rare. Few artists are unafraid to let go of the work they’re known for. There are others—Elaine Sturtevant, Henrik Olesen, Puppies Puppies—who have this quality too. But Thek? He is one of my daddies. Making work that I hope would impress him is sometimes a driving force. I don’t take it as far as you do, though. You seem more obsessed, so much so that you’ve made works as if he were still alive. That’s another kind of kink, eh? What do you have to say for yourself?
ALESSANDRO
Thek and other antiestablishment artists of his generation are the elephant in the room for a creative and economic system that remains “insecure,” still rooted in parameters like synthesis and familiarity with the present. To me, the combination of Thek’s decaying and hyperrealistic forms, his methodological queerness, and his relationship with time as a looming threat was a revelation. I began to see so many recent works—especially my own—as deeply appropriative of his practice, particularly on a formal level. The elephant had turned into a mammoth—no, a dinosaur.
At that point, my kink for Thek became a self-imposed sentence. After years of studying his work and poetics, I felt the need to step aside—to truly understand what I was doing and avoid returning to the first-person singular without first giving something back to him. Even though I realized it late, this became one of the reasons why the disorder of artistic language—which fascinates me the most—exists. I asked myself: Why not hack art history itself? Why not extend the life of an artist who prophesied his own death so many times, seeking, in his productive schizophrenia, the most fearless form of expressive freedom—or perhaps a chance at survival in other worlds and through multiple lives?
That’s why I structured the works in Ghostwriting Paul Thek1 as I did, acting within fiction as a ghostwriter and presenting four pieces attributed to Thek across different years: Br’Er Rabbit (attrib. to Paul Thek [1998?]), Televisione / Collaborazione (attrib. to Paul Thek and Mario Schifano [1969?]), Baby Cast (attrib. to Paul Thek [1975?]), and To Wong (attrib. to Paul Thek [2017?]). I was hoping that, centuries from now, when this conversation is long forgotten, they might actually be attributed to him for real.
That said, through the “fandom” where I developed this project, namely by embodying someone else’s work, I was able to better understand what it means to be alive today and what it means to exchange—not saliva, but memory, across years, with someone I’ve never met. It also helped me see my body as something that doesn’t have to conform socially—not even as the most beautiful or symmetrical form, but simply as something that exists. More importantly, it made me question what it means to be classified as an artist, what my identity is as both a person and an artist, and whether I even want an identity. Monsters are what I love the most.
SHAHRYAR
Yeah, you’ve become some kind of cannibalistic Talented Mr. Ripleywith this impersonation. It’s really quite original to think this way about another artist, both as a means of understanding them and as a method for shaping your own work. You turn art making into an act of possession. Think of the contrast: my saliva is exchanged between two sex workers, yours with a dead artist. It’s quite beautifully morbid. Oh hi, Desire. Hi, Death. And where do they meet? In the necessity of exchange between two individuals.
ALESSANDRO
I absolutely agree. Maybe they meet in an equally beautiful and morbid film, more or less like this: Death and Desire, two close friends who attend a party. They enter a beautiful house with glass windows in every wall. Other guests see them at the door and begin to cry, unsure if it’s from fear or pleasure. The friends cry for both reasons simultaneously, so intensely that their tears flood the living room, lifting and enveloping all the party guests. On the terrace, three people—one drunk (the lover), one high (the boyfriend), and one sober (the hustler)—watch as the house transforms into an aquarium.
SHAHRYAR
Period. Mic drop.
Shahryar Nashat is a visual artist. He has had solo shows at MASI Lugano, Switzerland; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Renaissance Society (with Bruce Hainley), Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; Swiss Institute, New York; and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. He shows with Sylvia Kouvali, Gladstone Gallery, and David Kordansky Gallery. Nashat creates videos and sculptures that investigate the body and its image as sites of desire, fragmentation, tenderness, and resilience. He treats digital and analog technologies—from LEDs to stone to cast resin—as prostheses, props, or stand-ins.
Alessandro Di Pietro is a visual artist who lives and works in Milan. His work has been exhibited at the Watermill Center, New York; CAN – Centre d’Art Neuchâtel; Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and Zazà Gallery, Milan. His works are in the collections of the MADRE, Naples, and MAMBO, Bologna. Di Pietro’s practice explores monstrosity and art history as open, un-objective formulas in which artistic references blur with biographical ones through speculative fiction, sculpture, film, and installations. Ghostwriting Paul Thek, a project born in 2017 at the American Academy in Rome, presents “unpublished works” attributed to the US artist; an eponymous book was published with Mousse in 2024.