SMARGINATE
Renate Bertlmann, Anuschka Blommers & Niels Schumm, Valie Export, Scott King, Jeff Koons, Leigh Ledare, Robert Mapplethorpe, Yamamoto Masao, Libera Mazzoleni, Yasumasa Morimura, Orlan, Gina Pane, Niki de Saint Phalle, Carol Rama, Gerhard Richter, Sophy Rickett, Lala Meredith-Vula, Joel Peter Witkin, Francesca Woodman
curated by Fabrizia Pironti and Sergey Kantsedal
with the assistance of Yuliya Say
text by Guido Costa
25.05.2022 — 19.06.2022
Smarginate is a collective exhibition opening in the spaces of Associazione Barriera on the occasion of the Turin fair dedicated to photography and image, The Phair.
The project emerges from a dialogue between the curator Sergey Kantsedal and Fabrizia Pironti, member of Associazione Barriera. The exhibition is centered around the theme of the body and explores its role within the narrative of the symbols of female subjectivity and its self-representation.
Smarginate attempts – through a transversal perspective on a single collection – to collect the revolutionary legacy of feminist art. From Valie Export to Orlan, from Gina Pane to Renate Bertlmann, from Sophy Rickett to Lala Meredith-Vula, the exhibition presents a series of exemplary works belonging to the history of photography and self-reappropriation of female body. Smarginate has a peculiar focus on strategies and techniques of disguise, considering them as a production and reproduction of identities that escape dominant cultural categories. These techniques give life to a role-playing game that can subvert habitual power relations. Photography too is given the task of challenging binary categories—male/female, oppressor/victim, active/passive. Feminist – often without being called such – the practices and poetics collected in the exhibition offer a harvest of stories marked by ambiguity and androgyny.
Suspended between gesture and posture, rapture and pain, the displayed bodies tell and want to tell themselves in a short-circuit of movements, impulses and glances, but also misunderstandings and revelations.
Photography by Gabriele Abbruzzese