PRATO.- The Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art presents two new episodes in the program of exhibitions for the winter, offering visitors multiple “female” perspectives. Confirming its leading role on the Italian and international scene, the contemporary art museum in Tuscany unveils two projects that combine historical research and support of the most recent experimentation.
Nomadic Subject. Female identity through the mages of five Italian photographers, 1965-1985, is a group show that comes to terms with the theme of representation of female identity in a period of major social and political transformations in Italy, through the images of Paola Agosti, Letizia Battaglia, Lisetta Carmi, Elisabetta Catalano and Marialba Russo. The show brings the works of these five women photographers together for the first time, with over 100 images that document a period of about twenty years.
Triumph, the spectacular installation by Aleksandra Mir composed of 2529 trophies, is a monument to the culture of amateur sport and the legacy of Italian pop culture.
Triumph becomes part of the collection of Centro Pecci in the context of the museum’s 30th anniversary, and confirms the emphasis on the output and research of important contemporary artists.
Soggetto nomade proposes a reflection on identity and its representation that takes its cue from the extraordinary portraits of the transvestites of Genoa by Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924), where the feminine mystique is an aspiration, and interpreted in the images of actresses, writers and artists by Elisabetta Catalano (Rome, 1941-2015), the coverage of the feminist movement by Paola Agosti (Turin, 1947), the women and girls of mafia-torn Sicily by Letizia Battaglia (Palermo, 1935), and men who take on a female identity for a single day during the carnival of small towns in Campania, explored by Marialba Russo (Naples, 1947).
The feminine image is thus the central focus, an image that is amplified, revealed and deconstructed, becoming a vehicle of non-bourgeois values, but also a vivid representation of an inner life that is able to break free of stereotypes. The exhibition presents over 100 images to document a period of about twenty years: it bears witness to the rise of new, multiple expressive urges, which though not constituting a “feminine specificity” offer a perspective of women on women and their identity.
The monumental installation Triumph by Aleksandra Mir, shown for the first time in Italy, was completed in 2009 and exhibited that same year at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and in 2012 at the South London Gallery in London. It is composed of 2.529 trophies collected by the artist across the span of a year in Sicily, in the city of Palermo and its vicinity.
The cups in the installation, dated from the 1940s onward, were gathered by means of an advertisement in Il Giornale di Sicilia in which the artist offered the symbolic sum of five euros for each trophy. The outcome of the initiative is an enormous, sparkling collection of keepsakes whose individual stories have been lost: a monument to youth and bygone glories, to the culture of amateur sport and the legacy of Italian popular history. Produced on an industrial scale, the trophies are objects of little intrinsic value, but of great emotional value for those who won them in the context of competition and raised them to the Gods, re-enacting a falsely believed ancient ritual, the product of modern sports culture appropriating the Church’s silver chalices. The striking contradiction between mass production and the nostalgic fetishism of the individual trophy culminates, long after the moment of glory has passed and the trophy has collected dust in the winners garage for many years, in the cathartic gesture of giving the memento of victory to the artist, as if to break free of a burden.
