Soggetto nomade / Nomadic Subject / Aleksandra Mir. Triumph

The Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art presents two new episodes in the program of exhibitions for the winter, offering visitors two projects that combine historical research and support of the most recent experimentation. On the occasion of its 30 years anniversary, the Pecci Center wants to highlight its new direction that pays a more specific attention on the inclusion of different voices in its collection and exhibition program.

Nomadic Subject. Female identity through the images of five Italian photographers. 1965-1985 is a group show that comes to terms with the theme of representation of female identity in a period of major social and political transformations in Italy, through the images of Paola Agosti, Letizia Battaglia, Lisetta Carmi, Elisabetta Catalano and Marialba Russo. The show brings the works of these five women photographers together for the first time, with over 100 images that document a period of about 20 years.

Triumph, the spectacular installation by Aleksandra Mir composed of 2,529 trophies, is a monument to the culture of amateur sport and the legacy of Italian pop culture.

Sogetto nomade / Nomadic Subject
Female identity through the images of five Italian photographers. 1965-1985
Paola Agosti, Letizia Battaglia, Lisetta Carmi, Elisabetta Catalano, Marialba Russo
curated by Cristiana Perrella and Elena Magini

Nomadic Subject brings together in an exhibition, for the first time, the images of five Italian women photographers, from the mid-60s to the 80s, to convey different perspectives on the experience, representation and interpretation of female subjectivity in a period of sweeping social change for Italy. Years of transition from radical political engagement to hedonism, years of terrorist violence but also of civil achievements, brought about mostly by women and the struggles of feminism.

A reflection on identity and its representation that takes its cue from the extraordinary portraits of the transvestites of Genoa by Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924), where the female mystique is an aspiration, and interpreted in the images of actresses, writers and artists by Elisabetta Catalano (Rome, 1941-2015), the coverage of the feminist movement by Paola Agosti (Turin, 1947), the women and girls of mafia-torn Sicily by Letizia Battaglia (Palermo, 1935), and men who take on a female identity for a single day during the carnival of small towns in Campania, explored by Marialba Russo (Naples, 1947). 

The images in the exhibition share in the representation of a vast and unconventional female universe in the wider sense of the term, where the body is not just the object of an external, prevalently male gaze, but become an active subject, a vehicle with which to express other non-standardized, non-heterocentric values.

Aleksandra Mir. Triumph
curated by Marta Papini

For its 30th anniversary, the Pecci Center presents a new entry in its collection: the monumental installation Triumph by Aleksandra Mir, shown for the first time in Italy.

Triumph, completed in 2009 and exhibited that same year at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and in 2012 at the South London Gallery in London, is a spectacular installation by Aleksandra Mir composed of 2,529 trophies collected by the artist across the span of a year in Sicily. The cups in the installation, dated from the 1940s onward, were gathered by means of an advertisement in Giornale di Sicilia: the outcome is an enormous, sparkling collection of keepsakes whose individual stories have been lost, a monument to youth and bygone glories, to the culture of amateur sport and the legacy of Italian popular history.

Sweat and effort, joy and deep sentiment, applause and celebration, reflected on the surface of these trophies, become faint, distant echoes in the exhibition, cumulatively conveyed by piles of inert metal, plastic and marble. Triumph is a true memento mori, a visual document of the transient nature of success and the need of all human beings, at some point in their lives, to come to terms with the past, abandoning the illusion of eternal youth.