Anohni has transformed a 16th-century cloister in Naples into a darkened, cavernous space for Jesus as a Girl, an artist takeover at Fondazione Made in Cloister that closes the foundation's two-year Rebirth programme. At its centre stands The Angel of Death (2026), a five-metre-tall abstract white form inspired by Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and renewal, surrounded by a projection of swans swimming on Berlin's canals at night and a new song written for the installation.

The exhibition, on view until 6 March 2027, grew out of a three-week residency in Naples. Alongside the monumental goddess, it gathers abstract paintings, texts and sculptures made largely from materials Anohni salvaged from the city's streets and industrial yards. Natural light in the Renaissance cloister of Santa Caterina a Formiello has been blocked out so the works line the perimeter of a shadowy room, lit in turn by the circling swan projection.

The show extends a long-running thread in Anohni's work: imagining a post-apocalyptic world in which Jesus is a girl. In that vision, the feminine archetype is restored to the centre of creation and human coexistence, and the renewal of the living world becomes possible. The swans, filmed in Berlin last winter while avian flu was killing birds on the Kreuzberg canals, are presented as witnesses that stand outside human ideas of good and evil.

Speaking about the work, Anohni connected her use of salvaged material to queer American experience, recalling how, after moving to New York in the 1980s, she found a David Wojnarowicz photograph in the rubbish at a time when the belongings of people who had died of AIDS were routinely thrown away. She described discarded matter as holding a kind of magic, and said that as a trans artist with only conditionally granted agency, she tries to use whatever platform she has as usefully as she can, having pushed herself as far as she feels able to go.