Holy Bite

Santi is pleased to announce Holy Bite, M Lissoni’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition emerges from Lissoni’s ongoing enquiry into the symbolic, political, and material force of relics, and the ways in which belief, narrative, and authority become attached to objects over time.

According to historical accounts, the nails of the True Cross were discovered in Jerusalem around three centuries after the Crucifixion by Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine. Through their attribution to Christ, these objects were reclassified as the Holy Nails, relics understood within Christian tradition as physical matter bearing direct contact with sacred history. Allegedly reforged into Constantine’s helmet and bridle (and later into the Iron Crown), the Holy Nails were absorbed into imperial regalia, binding sacred authority to political power.

From this point, relics circulated within ecclesiastical and imperial systems as instruments of legitimacy, functioning as symbolic currency whose value exceeded the economic. Holy Bite examines this enduring entanglement of devotion, power, and ritual, tracing how relics move through oral histories, political genealogies, and institutional aesthetic frameworks.

In parallel, the exhibition introduces intimate and queer fragments, personal objects and fragile traces that persist outside official archives. Presented within display languages associated with care and reverence, these materials are held alongside relics while remaining distinct. Rather than stabilising authority, they suggest alternative forms of transformation, in which history is felt through queer embodiment, private myth, and lived experience.

Holy Bite unfolds across three spaces. In the first, photographs and personal fragments are gathered in formats that echo reliquary display, their subtle details afforded the weight of preservation and care. A second body of work traces an index of claimed relics across centuries, where devotion, power, and unofficial remains surface through parallel timelines.
Beyond a threshold of copper curtains, the exhibition culminates in an installation of carpentry nails presented as relics of the True Cross.

Across its three bodies of work, Holy Bite brings relics, intimate fragments, and archival gestures into dialogue, following how objects carry stories across bodies and time, and how attachments to them continue to take shape at the edges of institutional narratives.

M LISSONI
M Lissoni is a transdisciplinary artist and publisher who lives and works between London and Italy. His research-based practice engages with religion, biopolitics, and memory. Recent presentations include Art & The Book at The Warburg Institute, London (2025); Educastration at FormaHQ, London (2025); God Willing at Shipton Gallery, London (2024); and Confessions at Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland (2023). Lissoni’s work is held in the collections of Central Saint Martins Special Collections; The Contemporary Art Library at Progetto Gallery, Lecce; The Wellcome Collection; and The Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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