Opening: Saturday July 8th 5pm
Public life, as the domain of common and shared social activities, involves not only spaces of work and leisure, but also other spaces of discourse and ideology. While the public is a system of norms and controls that regulate actions, behaviours, and discourses rather than a space of freedom and equality, women's movements in the last decade have taken public life as a territory to be transformed. The street has become the most prominent stage for these movements, with marches and demonstrations incorporating slogans common to many countries. Images and records of such movements serve as an introduction to a series of works in which the public symbolises the collective, and where the mechanisms of control and the forms of authority are brought to light.
The exhibition Public Life reflects these forms of action and attempts to look through some of the lenses in which the spaces that have historically been assigned to women come into tension. The works gathered herein, created by artists from different geographies, share a common feature: they have been conceived on the basis of an image of the collective, and the communal and emotional ties. In the symbolic network that gives rise to these pieces, the bodies write, rewrite, and discuss ways to experience public life. This includes street demonstrations and actions that have been building spaces of encounter and organisation in recent years. At the same time, the works look at other, less evident aspects, such as the canons of beauty that structure dress codes, care practices as precarious work laden with both love and sadness, the medical-scientific system that objectifies and bureaucratises bodies, leisure and intimacy through the practice of portraiture as an emotional genre, and art history as an ideological text that has established guidelines for the value attributed to images.
Clarisa Appendino
Image: María María Acha-Kutscher, Me cuidan mis amigas, no la policía
