Pascali Foundation pays tribute to Chiara Fumai with exhibition on the thought of Carla Lonzi

The Pascali Foundation in Polignano a Mare opens Fall 2024 with the exhibition Chiara says Chiara visitable from Oct. 19 at 6 p.m. until Jan. 12, 2025, curated by Andrea Bellini and Milovan Farronato and paying tribute to artist Chiara Fumai (Rome, 1978 - Bari, 2017). An artist of Apulian origin, Fumai is among the most recognized in the national and international scene of her generation. The exhibition explores the importance of Carla Lonzi’s thought, presenting the 2012 installation Shut Up and Actually Talk, conceived by Fumai on the occasion of her participation in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel.

The work is a sound installation in which the artist’s recorded voice recites excerpts from Lonzi’s 1970Spit on Hegel and other writings from Rivolta Femminile. Hitherto presented within the Moral Exhibition House, for the first time the work is placed in conversation with This Last Line Cannot Be Translated, the mural conceived by Fumai in 2017 in New York during her residency at ISCP, and exhibited posthumously in the Italian Pavilion at the 58. Venice Art Biennale in 2019. Lines and words from the invocation of the Mass of Chaos form the outline of the interior of a cave that houses an esoteric anthology of symbols and seals, along with instructions for the use of a rite of protection against all social and spiritual conditioning. Chiara Fumai’s entire practice can be seen as an act of revolt against the constraints, prejudices and stereotypes nested in the system of thought and power and in the very mechanisms of language. The exhibition traces the entire span of Fumai’s artistic activity through some crucial stages enclosed within a path in which the incipit coincides with the epilogue. The incipit is in fact marked by two video works from 2007 that contributed to the first solo exhibition at the independent Careof space in Milan. Both are an integral part of a complex project dedicated to Italian music of the 1970s, performance, Southern Italian culture and the figure of Nico Fumai, an imaginary singer-songwriter inspired mainly by the father figure. Nico Fumai is the protagonist of a performance that has evolved over time, presented at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice in 2009, at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo in Guarene d’Alba in 2010, at MAXXI in Rome in 2011, before returning in the last exhibition designed by Fumai and held posthumously in November 2017 by Guido Costa Projects in Turin, Nico Fumai Being Remixed.

The 2007 video The Night Is Still Young exhibited alongside this latest installation creates a loop that connects the beginning with the end. The latter will also be documented by a series of previously unpublished works on paper. These are collages, watercolors, embroideries and drawings made with different techniques that shed light on the more intimate aspects of Chiara Fumai’s last period, a private and fast production recently investigated and organized by the Chiara Fumai Archive. Based in Polignano a Mare, theChiara Fumai Archive is an association founded in 2022, directed by Andrea Bellini and Milovan Farronato, curators of the exhibition, chaired by Micaela Paparella and with Roberto Spada as its vice president. The exhibition will let the continuity emerge along with the evolution of the themes explored by the artist and the recurring subjects throughout her multifaceted practice: the centrality of female characters, provocative and revolutionary, the struggle against censorship and social constraints, the concept of sisterhood, embodied by a practice open to collaboration and proximity with that of other artists, especially women.

On the occasion of Chiara says Chiara, the early video The Moustache Woman from 2007 will be donated to the Fondazione Pino Pascaliin order to leave a trace of the artist’s work in her home territory. The video introduces the subject of the bearded woman, later embodied by Annie Jones, a famous character from the Barnum circus of the late 19th century, impersonated on several occasions by Chiara Fumai in her 2010 work The Prodigy of Nature, exhibited for the first time at Palazzo Mincuzzi in Bari as part of the Gemine Muse exhibition, presented by Antonella Marino.

Pascali Foundation pays tribute to Chiara Fumai with exhibition on the thought of Carla Lonzi

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