Tomaso Binga at Madre in Naples: a retrospective on the desecrating power of visual poetry

The Madre Museum in Naples celebrates the career of Tomaso Binga (Salerno, 1931) with EUFORIA, the largest museum retrospective dedicated to the artist, born Bianca Pucciarelli Menna. Curated by Eva Fabbris with Daria Kahn, the exhibition opens April 17, 2025 and will be on view through July 22. Through an exhibition that occupies the eighteen rooms on the museum’s third floor, EUFORIA presents more than one hundred and twenty works including visual poems, installations, collages, photographs and unpublished documents, tracing four decades of artistic research.

The title of the exhibition emerged during conversations between the artist and Eva Fabbris. EUFORIA, - a word particularly beloved by Binga because it contains all vowels, phonetically universal and extroverted, “becomes a title-manifesto,” the curator explains, “a wish, a political necessity of resistance,” and distinguishes as much her approach to verbo-visual practice as to feminism.

The exhibition represents the fruit of two years of research conducted in collaboration with the artist and her archive. The exhibition itinerary, conceived by multidisciplinary collective Rio Grande in dialogue with Binga, develops through a circular layout that emphasizes the experimental nature of the project. Among the works on display are historical works and materials that have never been presented before or have been repurposed decades after their first appearance. Accompanying the exhibition is a volume published by Lenz Press, edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal and Stefania Zuliani. Structured in three sections, the book includes critical essays, an interview with the artist and an in-depth look at visual poetry, with detailed analyses of works and cycles of works. The publication was produced with the support of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council 2023 program and with the support of the Friends of Madre Association.

“Binga’s work challenges social and cultural conventions,” says Angela Tecce, president of the Donnaregina Foundation, “exploring themes related to gender and the critique of language. (...) Emblematic examples of her contribution are the alphabets in which the artist’s body takes on the forms of letters, a synthesis of verbal and visual language.”

“My Male Name”; says Binga, “plays on irony and displacement; it wants to expose the male privilege that reigns in the field of art, it is a contestation by paradox of a superstructure that we have inherited and that, as women, we want to destroy. In art, gender, age, nationality should not be discriminators. The Artist is not a man or a woman but a PERSON.”

Notes on the artist

Tomaso Binga, born in Salerno in 1931 and active in Rome, has chosen since 1971 to adopt a masculine name to emphasize, with irony and provocation, gender privileges even in the cultural sphere. Her artistic practice combines visual poetry with performance, resulting in a language that subverts the conventions of artistic and social discourse. Through wordplay, verb-visual writing and performative gestures, Binga has developed an aesthetic deeply connected to feminism, with an approach that mixes desecration, humor and denunciation.

Binga is one of the leading figures in Italian phonetic-sound-performance poetry and participated in the historic exhibition Materialization of Language at the 1978 Venice Art Biennale, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio. Throughout his career he has exhibited in national and international institutions such as the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, the São Paulo Biennale, the Quadriennale in Rome, the Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, Museion in Bolzano, Mimosa House in London, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. In addition to her artistic activity, Binga was a lecturer in Mass Media Theory and Method at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone and played a central role in cultural organization. Since 1974 she has directed the Lavatoio Contumaciale association in Rome and since 1992 has been vice president, then president, of the Filiberto Menna Foundation in Salerno.

Tomaso Binga at Madre in Naples: a retrospective on the desecrating power of visual poetry

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