PASCALI FOUNDATION
Chiara says Chiara
The exhibition dedicated to Chiara Fumai and curated by Andrea Bellini and Milovan Farronato opens on the 19th of October at 6 PM. On this occasion, the Archive Chiara Fumai will donate her debut video The Moustache Woman (2007) to the Pino Pascali Museum Foundation.
The Pino Pascali Foundation opens this autumn season 2024 with the exhibition Chiara says Chiara, thus paying homage to the artist Chiara Fumai (Rome 1978 – Bari 2017) in the rooms of Polignano a Mare. Fumai was an Italian artist of Apulian descent, and one of the most nationally and internationally renowned of her generation.
As the title suggests, the exhibition delves into the importance of Carla Lonzi’s thought in the artist’s work, thus presenting the installation Shut Up, Actually Talk (2012), conceived by Fumai when taking part in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel.
The work is a sound installation in which the artist’s recorded voice reads texts from Lonzi’s Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel, 1970) and other texts by the Female Revolt (Rivolta Femminile). Almost as if moved by the uttered words, a shelf containing philosophy books
collapses to the ground together with fragments of furniture, broken mirrors and the copy of a famous portrait of Hegel, thus reenacting the collapse of western patriarchal society. So far only exhibited at the Moral Exhibition House, this artwork is here displayed for the first time
in conversation with This Last Line Cannot Be Translated, the grand mural created by Fumai in 2017 in New York, during her residency at the ISCP, and exhibited after her death in the Italian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Here, lines and words taken from a
reference to Mass of Chaos create a ragged profile of the inside of a cave, which welcomes within its walls an esoteric anthology of symbols and seals, together with instructions for a protective ritual against all social and spiritual influences. Chiara Fumai’s entire artwork,
which spanned over the course of a decade, can be considered a revolutionary act against constraints, prejudices and stereotypes that lurk in the thought and power system and in its language.
As in one of the symbols of the vast mural artwork, where two extreme edges of the same orthogonal plane bend and flex to meet, the exhibition traces the entire span of Fumai’s artistic career through several crucial stages, brought into a tightly interwoven dialogue for
the first time, and enclosed within a journey where the beginning coincides with the end. As a matter of fact, the incipit is marked by two 2007 video installations, which were included in the artist’s first solo exhibition in the independent space Careof in Milan, and which have
subsequently rarely been displayed. They are both integral parts of a complex project dedicated to Italian music from the 1970s, to performance as learning, to Southern Italian culture and to Nico Fumai – an imaginary singer and songwriter mainly inspired by her
father figure. Nico Fumai is the main character of a performance that has evolved through time and has been presented on several occasions: at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice in 2009, at King Rebaudengo’ Palace in Guarene d’Alba in 2010, at MAXXI in Rome in
2011, before returning , in a different shape with Nico Fumai Being Remixed, the last exhibition planned by Fumai and held after her death, in November 2017 by Guido Costa Projects in Turin.
The 2007 video The Night Is Still Young, displayed with the latter installation, creates a loop that connects the beginning to the end. The latter period, experienced by the artist in Bari, will also be documented by a multitude of previously unseen works on paper. These include
collages, watercolors, embroideries, and drawings created using various techniques, shedding light on the more intimate aspects of Chiara Fumai’s final phase. This private and rapid production has recently been explored and organized by the Chiara Fumai Archive. Located
in Polignano a Mare, the Chiara Fumai Archive is an organisation created in 2022 and headed by Andrea Bellini and Milovan Farronato, curators of the exhibition, and managed by Micaela Paparella and Roberto Spada as vice-president. This nonprofit organization aims at protecting, promoting and enhancing the artist’s works, as well as creating a digital archive of her artwork through a careful system of certifying and archiving. The exhibition’s juxtaposition of works from different periods, both intimate and environmental in nature, will highlight the continuity and evolution of the themes explored by the artist and the recurring subjects throughout her multifaceted practice: the centrality of provocative and revolutionary female figures, the fight against censorship and social constraints, and the concept of sisterhood, embodied in a practice open to collaboration and proximity to the work of other artists, particularly women.
This latter aspect is represented in the exhibition through the portrait The She-Ornithologist (2018) which Paulina Olowska dedicated to the artist. The painting, in turn, transforms Chiara Fumai, into a muse belonging to a wide and well known gallery of portraits by female artists. In addition, the video BUSTROFEDICO by Anna Franceschini in which the latter chases This Last Line Cannot Be Translated in the tortuous paths of the context in whic the mural was exhibited in 2019. Finally, the exhibition also includes the homage that Chiara Fumai paid to Vera Morra with One Strangling Golden Hair (2011-13) a piece that serves as a conceptual casting of the work by a young artist from the Brera Academy, who passed away prematurely. It was created by Fumai for the group exhibition Arimortis (2013) at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, following a suggestion from co-curator Roberto Cuoghi. By rediscovering some documents and previously unseen works, the exhibition aims to enrich the understanding of Chiara Fumai and her work, while also strengthening the connection between her international experience and her birthplace..
On the occasion of the exhibition Chiara says Chiara, the Chiara Fumai Archive will donate her debut video The Moustache Woman (2007) to the Pino Pascali Museum Foundation, in order to leave an important trace of the artist’s work in her birthplace. The legacy is part of a donation program carried out by the Chiara Fumai Archive, aimed at ensuring the artist’s work is included in the collections of institutions both Italian and international—that have supported her work or intend to promote it, emphasizing the significance and impact of her legacy. The video introduces the subject of a bearded lady, later played by Annie Jones – famous character of the late 1800s Barnum Circus – and often played by Chiara Fumai in The Prodigy of Nature (2010), exhibited for the first time at Palazzo Mincuzzi in Bari within the festival
Gemine Muse,presented by Antonella Marino.The Pino Pascali Museum will host footage of Fuamai’s performances and backstage recordings, among which, thanks to the photographer and filmmaker Nicola Cipriani, will be the recordings of Fumai’s first time dressing up as Annie Jones in Bari, and an unseen University lecture within the Design and Fashion course at IUAV in Venice in 2013. Together with these, further documents to better understand Chiara Fumai’s thoughts can be found.
Chiara says Chiara
Opening: 19th October 6 PM – until 12th January 2025
curated by Milovan Farronato and Andrea Bellini
Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali
Via Parco del Lauro 119
Polignano a Mare
www.fondazionepascali.it
press@fondazionepascali.it
