Statistics attributable to gender-based violence show ups and downs in the number of victims. Generally the increasing number concerns women, often killed in the family environment by partners or ex-partners out of possessiveness, revenge and various other reasons influenced by different circumstances that nevertheless do not count as justifications. Still with enormous struggle, women begin to oppose and denounce their perpetrators but often these enormous efforts are not enough to prevent the worst and for a high number of cases, they are not even enough to raise common awareness. Men’s superior physical strength and the current events always frame men in the role of perpetrators and women as the injured party. But what if this reality were reversed?
Daniela Comani, “YOU ARE MINE”, installation view. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, ph. Adriano Mura, courtesy the artist
Artist Daniela Comani (Bologna, 1965), whose work reflects on identity, addresses the difficult and painful issue of feminicide. The Galleria Nazionale d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome presents YOU ARE MINE, a site-specific installation located in the Bazzani Corridor, which can be visited until 29 January 2023. Under the curatorship of Miriam Schoofs, the artist proposes a series of reproduced and manipulated newspaper articles that report news stories related to murders suffered against men: the role of the perpetrator in these stories is inverted and covered by women who, for reasons as absurd as they are unfortunately real, inflict violence of all kinds on their partners. This subtly courageous artistic operation reverses roles and prompts us to reflect on the dramatic situation of gender-based violence, even forcing us to imagine surreal and terrifying scenes that horrify.
Daniela Comani, “YOU ARE MINE”, 2022. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Courtesy the artist
“The effect of this subversive reversal is surprising, precisely because we are used to locating the perpetrator in the male figure“, writes curator Miriam Schoofs. But do we cringe at the violence itself or the fact that it is women who carry it out? This is a question I have been fearfully asking myself, because it is true that men’s aggression that results in overwhelm is considered within a certain limit to be part of gender, but perhaps we are so accustomed and resigned to the fact that it is women who suffer that the idea that even in the female gender there may be so much hatred upsets us. With this reversal Comani stages a truly surprising action that invites us to reflect on the absurdities related to feminicide, which still perhaps do not strike enough of a chord.
Daniela Comani, “YOU ARE MINE”, 2022. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Courtesy the artist
The fifteen large prints made on cotton and aluminum underwent a process of alteration by the artist, who crumpled them up and then hung them on the wall. Walking down the corridor, the sensation one experiences is certainly striking: these newspaper clippings, which are unsupported, seem to want to disengage from the wall and strike the viewer frontally without any mediation, accentuating the plastic dimension of the work and accelerating the communication of such strong facts. The sensation of estrangement caused by reading these newspaper clippings becomes an interpreter of a culture still drugged by fear and diseducation and highlights the importance of art as a cultural tool of social denunciation.
Info:
Daniela Comani, YOU ARE MINE
curated by Miriam Schoofs
18/10/2022-29/01/2023
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Viale delle Belle Arti 131, 00197 Roma
Born in Reggio Calabria in 1998. In Rome she graduated in Historical-Artistic Studies with an experimental thesis on the artist Nik Spatari. She has written for some magazines and is currently a student of the master’s degree course in Art History. She appreciates art in every declination and loves to tell it.
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