SPOTLIGHT // Daniela Comani – The Reading Room
The Reading Room by Daniela Comani presents several bodies of work and a site-specific installation conceived and produced especially for her solo exhibition at the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz. The diverse works present a dialogue on gender, stereotypes, femicide, and the interpretation of language through the use of the text-image and photography.
These works heighten the awareness of violence and power dynamics and their structural sources embedded in language and in socio-political and gender inequalities.
Comani’s text based works and installation aim to underlie linguistically generated discrimination and clichés that are (re-) produced by the media and in print.
These works include multilingual, comparative studies between languages, sparking a conversation about gender inequality in Europe from a feminist perspective and shedding light on worrying data related to violence against women.
For the exhibition - curated by Chiara Valci Mazzara and Susanne Prinz - Comani produced 11 new text-based works from her series You Are Mine (pigment print on cotton with aluminum backing, each 110 x 70 x 5 cm), based on accounts of femicide in German and international press articles. The works are a continuation of the series concerning femicide in Italy, produced and presented by the artist at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in 2022.
In the ongoing series, the artist collects articles related to real acts of violence against women that dominate headlines in the media, manipulating them by reversing the gender of the subjects. This linguistic shift - turning perpetrators into victims and vice versa - is an exercise in practical feminist linguistics and triggers a shock by placing a new focus on the absurdity of femicide.
The video work Reversal Exercise reveals the working process of the series You Are Mine: We see a computer screen and watch as a cursor changes the gender in reports about femicide in real time. Here the viewer takes the place of the artist sitting behind a screen and witnesses how the narrative swiftly and dramatically changes with a simple yet subversive gesture.
The large-scale, site-specific installation Orlando's Library, dedicated in title to Virginia Woolf's genderfluid heroine Orlando, features photographs of bookshelves with over 300 digitally-placed books (from Comani’s series “New Publications edited by Daniela Comani” 2007-ongoing) whose titles the artist manipulates by changing the gender of the named protagonists: Le Petit Prince becomes La Petite Princesse, and The Old Man and the Sea becomes The Old Woman and the Sea.
A selection of the ongoing-series Cover Versions will also be presented, where the artist reenacts cover images from political magazines such as Der Spiegel and Time, posing as the protagonist of the headlines with self-portraits, like a media diary.
Artist Book
“You Are Mine” by Daniela Comani, Monroe Books
Current exhibitions:
Daniela Comani: The Reading Room
Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin
September 14 – November 1, 2024
Finissage & Book Launch
Nov 1, 2024 at 6 PM
KUNSTVEREIN AM ROSA-LUXEMBURG-PLATZ, BERLIN
Überall und nirgendwo. Kunst im Postkartenformat von Daniela Comani, Mechtild Frisch und Nadya Sayapina
July 5, 2024 – February 9, 2025
Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg
Daniela Comani, Orlando's Library
Site-specific installation at Palazzo Ducale
April 25 - December 31, 2024
Artenumero. Gli Artisti e il numero tra XX e XXI secolo
June 18 – October 20, 2024
Museo Archeologico, Aosta
Material Turn - Pretending You Are Unseen
May 16 – November 18, 2024
Druckwerkstatt, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin
Upcoming exhibitions:
Wir sind Demokratie
September 11 – November 21, 2024
Opening: September 12, 2024, 6 pm
Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V., Berlin
Bangkok Art Biennale 2024, Nature Gaia
October 24, 2024 – February 25, 2025
Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok,
-
