Chiara Bersani has declared herself a unicorn. You’ll find the Italian performance artist in Room 31 of the National Gallery, surrounded by 17th-century French painting, curled in the corner of the floor while the audience sits on cushions around the edges of the room.
It’s a fantasy that Bersani somehow makes it easy to join her in, however you might translate the idea of unicorns. The less that happens in any work of art, perhaps, the more open it is to interpretation, and for 40 minutes, Bersani does very little. She awakens from a little slumber, she sits, crawls very slowly on hands and knees, looks at us, crawls closer.
