LINA FUCA’
VEDONELVELONONVEDO
curated by Marina Guida
3 July – 5 August 2021
Sala delle Carceri in the Castel dell’Ovo, Naples
At 12.30 p.m. on 3 July, the Sala delle Carceri in the Castel dell’Ovo will see the inauguration of the first solo exhibition in Naples of the artist Lina Fucà, in a show entitled vedonelvelononvedo (‘IseeintheveilIseenot’), curated by Marina Guida, promoted by the Culture and Tourism Department of the City of Naples, and under the patronage of the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee.
The project, conceived specifically for Castel dell’Ovo, features three large-scale works in which the key theme is the artist’s long-standing research into the concept of otherness, or rather the knowledge of ourselves as acquired through relationships and encounters with others. Video has been chosen as the most-suited medium of investigation and observation of reality, constructing images that are both poetic and political.
In the video, vedonelvelononvedo, which gives the exhibition its title, the encounter between two worlds and two ways of perceiving and narrating the body are illustrated. Images alternate of a young Muslim woman, an Egyptian student at the school where Lina Fucà teaches, and the artist herself.
The camera lingers over the details: a hand holding a knife and cutting an onion, and in sequence another hand performing the same action; the girl intent on arranging a headscarf, in what is not only a daily habit but also an elegant sacred ritual. Almost as if to counterbalance these images come others showing the artist washing her hair in a metal basin. The hair is in the foreground, the movements are slow and timeless, while the sound of the dripping water is heard, taking us back to a primitive emotion.
The second work, entitled unopertreugualesette (‘onetimesthreeequalsseven’), consists of five screens, each containing three videos arranged one above the other like three narrative sequences.
Once again, the protagonist of the images is the artist, as she is dressed and made up by women of different ages and nationalities. A profound relationship is created between them. As they powder and wrap the body in a game of cross-references and interchanges, the women reveal something of their own intimacy. The artist’s dressing thus seems to correspond to their exposure.
nonbastaunmilionedipassi (‘amillionstepsisnotenough’) is the third installation in the exhibition. It represents the evolution of a group of works that the artist created at the end of an artistic residency in Cuba in the summer of 2016. Invited to the island by the Fondazione Merz, Lina Fucà moved around to different locations and came into contact with many people, to whom she entrusted a number of disposable cameras, asking them to use them freely.
These shots, presented in light boxes, are accompanied by a video showing hands crocheting ten kilometres of thread that the artist has made by unravelling jute sacks used on the island to harvest coffee and cocoa. The result is a long rope, a metaphor for encounters and relationships, a physical and mental trace of this choral experience, the journey made with the story of the world the artist encountered.
The project has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Fondazione Merz and the Galleria Giorgio Persano.
Lina Fucà (Turin, 1972)
After attending Liceo Artistico, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, graduating in painting. In those same years she began to perform live painting with the “Barrito degli Angeli” theatre group. This experience amplified the artist’s aptitude for creating a dialogue between her figurative practice and other forms of expression such as theatre, music and video. The natural evolution of this dynamic relationship has led her to work on set and costume design with numerous independent theatre and film companies.
In recent years, the interaction between different languages has become the hallmark of her research, which begins with a reflection on the perception of the self in relation to the perception of “others”.
Evidence of this can be seen in the works presented at Galleria Giorgio Persano in April 2016, where a solo exhibition featured a number of works that were the result of an interweaving that takes shape in multifaceted forms and visual modes. Recently, the artist held a solo show at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid (2017) and held the “Solo da bambini” exhibition (2019) with Daniele Gaglianone and Paolo Leonardo, at the Fondazione Merz in Turin. In the same year, she participated in Palermo in the “Intermezzo 2019” project, a video-art exhibition at Villa Zito, curated by Agata Polizzi for Fondazione Sicilia.
EXHIBITION OPENING TIMES
Daily from 10.30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Sunday from 10.30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Tuesday closed
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