Now You Can Go: Autoritratti

The Showroom

Penfold Street, London
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm, 11th December 2015

Curated by Laura Leuzzi and Giulia Casalini

With the participation of artists Cinzia Cremona, Catherine Elwes, Tina Keane, Maria Teresa Sartori and Elaine Shemilt. Readings by Diana Georgiou.

Autoritratti was a performative screening. It employed different methodological tools, including dialogue, autobiography, cross-genre and fragmented narratives. The approach was inspired by Italian feminist thinker Carla Lonzi and her book Autoritratto [Self-portrait] (1969), which was her farewell to the art world.

This screening interlaced ‘self-portraits’ of women artists who have worked around identity and self-definition, in dialogical and confrontational terms towards the ‘other,’ from the 1970s to the present. The selected artists explore their own self and the dual role of being a woman and a professional artist. Using real and interpreted voices, their works address women’s relationships towards their own and male bodies, their love and desires, motherhood, the household, the community, and patriarchal society, history and tradition at large.

Ketty La Rocca, Appendice per una supplica, 1972; Anna Valeria Borsari, Autoritratto in una stanza, documentario [Selfportrait in a Room, Documentary], 1977; Catherine Elwes, Postcard, 1986; Elisabetta di Sopra, Dust Grains, 2014; Elaine Shemilt, Doppelgänger, 1979-81; Maria Teresa Sartori, The Drawers, 2013; Federica Marangoni, The Box of Life, 1979; Tina Keane, Clapping Songs, 1979; Cinzia Cremona, Before You Now, 2013.

In collaboration with the AHRC funded project ‘EWVA European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s’ (DJCAD, University of Dundee). Special thanks to Archivio Cavallino, Venice and the  Estate Ketty La Rocca, Florence (managed by the artist’s son Michelangelo Vasta). Technical support by Adam Lockhart.

For more information please visit:

www.theshowroom.org/events/now-you-can-go

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