99%

Exhibition by Lada Uchaeva
Curated by collettivoSERRA

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On display from 18/05/2025 to 21/06/2025
Opening Sunday 18/05/2025 at 18:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan

99% is the title of Lada Uchaeva’s exhibition, part of IRA GENERANS, the exhibition season that explores anger as a necessary and natural response to both social and personal injustices and oppressions. Seen as a driving force for transformation and change, anger becomes the focal point of a collective reflection that involves artists and collectives, who are called upon to legitimize themselves through their artistic practice.

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Lada Uchaeva is a visual artist whose work explores themes related to feminism, the concept of time, national identity, and institutional violence, producing essential and incisive images that sit at the intersection of political gesture and symbolic form. Uchaeva uses embroidery as both an artistic and political practice, transforming a technique traditionally associated with women’s labor into a tool of resistance and protest. At spazioSERRA, she presents 99%, an installation that reflects on economic inequality and the fragility of forms of opposition, inviting us to consider anger not as a destructive force but as a shared possibility for recognition and solidarity.
 

99% evokes an already politicized imaginary, but here it takes on an existential dimension. Who decides and who is protected, who consumes and who is left on the margins: the round table—where the 1% sits—becomes the stage of power, while the trash becomes the tangible sign of its distribution. The tablecloth laid on the table bears two embroidered phrases, “you have a right to remain opulent / you have a right to remain violent”, which precisely condense the structure of a system in which rights bend to privilege and violence is a recognized prerogative of those in power. Working through subtraction, Uchaeva employs a sparse, symbolic material grammar: baton-shaped cutlery, barbed-wire roses, trash, blacks and whites. The anger driving the work is not an individual outburst but a shared claim: it is the awareness that the material conditions of life are unequal, and that this inequality is neither inevitable nor natural, but constructed and sustained. Uchaeva proposes an image of collectivity based on the sharing of economic and political experience, where we are the 99% not by essence, but through shared experience. 99% asks us to dwell in conflict, to bear its weight, and to recognize that forms of resistance also take shape starting from a minimal gesture: being angry.