hall 2.1, booth L10 Unlimited U63
As a woman, mother, and artist, Anna Maria Maiolino acutely felt the limits imposed to her freedom of expression during the decades of Brazilian military dictatorship, which she actively resisted and denounces through her actions, photographs and videos as a firsthand witness. Her practice subsequently saw a ‘rebirth’ and evolved to include essential and generative gestures that translate feminine sensitivity—with an extreme act of synthesis—into graphic signs on paper as well as sculptures. Her own installation of works on the wall is composed like a musical score, where different elements come together with harmony and movement.Ana Mendieta’s photographic series Untitled (Rape Scene) takes us back inside domestic walls with the ‘scream’ of a tragic news story from 1973 which saw the assault and murder of a fellow female student of the University of Iowa. Mendieta staged a reconstruction of the event in her apartment, conceiving the performance ‘as a reaction against the idea of violence against women’. The Lolita Carpet by Barbara Bloom here acts as a sort of redemption and possible example of female control over the male. Elements yielding from the domestic environment, such as the carpet and reading, are here loaded with meanings deriving from Lolita’s behavior towards the co-protagonist of the novel, Humbert Humbert; these aspects have contributed to undermine patriarchal society and thought since 1955, the year the book’s publication. Bloom’s carpet reproduces the cover ofthe first edition of Lolita and incorporates Nabokov’s hand-written notes about the book itself, hinting at the author’s reconsideration of their own words; writing provokes second thoughts.Simultaneously we are proud to present in the Unlimited section two video installations: Yael Bartana’s Malka Germania, in which is investigated the longing for collective redemption as a response to an age of anxiety and Anna Maria Maiolino’s Twice: X & Y, a manifesto of grief and condemnation from a feminine standpoint.