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Food Age. Food as Influencer
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Daniela Comani. YOU ARE MINE
17/10/2022-12/02/2023
The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea puts on show the work YOU ARE MINE with which Daniela Comani addresses the extremely pressing issue of feminicide. Through a site-specific installation conceived for the Corridoio Bazzani of the Galleria Nazionale, the artist shares her reflections by displaying a series of reproductions of collected, selected, archived and manipulated newspaper articles reporting news of murders that have occurred within domestic walls. But this time, a different point of view is given: “I have inverted the reporting of our newspapers (the man becomes the woman, the victim the executioner and vice versa), thus inviting us to reflect on the phenomenon of feminicide and its absurdity” (Daniela Comani).
This collection of text-images features a series of newspapers reports populated by impetuous and violent women, jealous wives, ex-girlfriends who do not accept betrayal or the end of a relationship, alongside men who suffer violence of all kinds, being beaten, chased, raped.
“Gender-based violence has characterised our history for millennia, especially when women have had the strength and courage to rebel and step out of their roles. In men, aggression is usually considered of a hormonal nature and, within certain limits, it is accepted as normal. While there is no standard profile for perpetrators of domestic violence, we can identify patterns that tend to reoccur. In the so-called ‘honour killings’, jealousy, revenge, possessiveness and hatred of women are the common reasons that lead to the abuse. In contrast, there is always little information about the victims. Usually, the media only report the first names and ages of the women, alongside, of course, the nature of the murder. The exact circumstances remain therefore obscure, hidden behind those walls where the drama unfolded. Comani reverses this brutal reality by inverting gender roles, turning the men into victims of violence within their own homes. The effect of this subversive reversal is surprising, precisely because we are used to identifying the culprit with the male figure,’ these are the words of curator Miriam Schoofs.
The exhibition
The artist’s new installation highlights the contrast, the dissonance, between the sobriety of media information and the tragedy of domestic violence and feminicide, inverting the genders and thus transforming women from victims to perpetrators: in this process, the crime news itself reveals the sense of estrangement and alienation under which is covered on a daily basis, in its formal detachment from the humanly experienced tragedy. Some facts come across as almost surreal, if not downright comical.
In the series of 15 prints enlarged onto a cotton and aluminium material that the artist crumples up, this original way of disclosing news events unfolds. It is precisely this textile material that, with its creased surface, lends a plastic character to the sequence of newspaper cuttings set up – unframed – in the exhibition space. The object-like nature of the installation generates a sculptural effect that adds a new layer of interpretation to Comani’s conceptual work, an unusual corporeality that emphasises the explosive nature of the theme addressed.
Just as Caravaggio’s and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598/1599) depicted an act of violence committed by a woman against a man, causing a huge sensation among contemporary viewers and becoming illustrious precedents of such a rare form of representation in the history of art, so today, through the power of the image, this work by Daniela Comani highlights the role of social commentary that art can play.
Daniela Comani (Bologna, 1965) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. In 1993 she received her MFA from the University of the Arts in Berlin. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Berlin. The winner of several prizes and scholarships, the artist has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Her work focuses on the themes of history, identity, gender and social stereotypes, using the same language as those media which become the vehicles, in our daily lives, of certain social values and cultural customs. Themes that she elaborates in a multimedia context. Her main works include Sono stata io. Diario 1900-1999, (It was me. A journal 1900-1999), in which Comani recounts in the first person from 1 January to 31 December, historical, political and cultural events that took place in the 20th century; in the photographic series Un matrimonio felice (A Happy Marriage), a work in progress since 2003, she stages, playing with gender stereotypes, the daily life of a couple by interpreting both subjects; again, in the series Novità editoriali (New publications) curated by Daniela Comani, she transforms milestones in the history of literature through an artistic operation that manipulates the covers by inverting the masculine with the feminine, and vice versa. In 2011, she takes part in the Venice Biennale for the San Marino Pavilion. Amongst other places, her works feature in the permanent collections of MAMbo, Bologna; Kupferstichkabinett – State Museums, Berlin; Folkwang Museum, Essen; Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem; Musée Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles.
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