A major exhibition on Chiara Fumai, an artist who died at age 39 in 2017, at Pecci in Prato

From April 2 to August 29, 2021, the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato will host a retrospective exhibition on Chiara Fumai (Rome, 1978 - Bari, 2017), the artist who died prematurely at the age of 39 in 2017: it is titled Poems I Will Never Release, curated by Milovan Farronato and Francesco Urbano Ragazzi in collaboration with Cristiana Perrella. The exhibition is part of a wide-ranging project that brings together several European institutions with the aim of revisiting the artist’s work, preserving her legacy and conveying it to a wide audience. Presented in late 2020 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, the exhibition, after the Centro Pecci, will travel for the next two years to La Loge in Brussels and Casa Encendida in Madrid, deepening the investigation of a creative personality who worked markedly on the languages of performance and feminist aesthetics in the 21st century.

Poems I Will Never Release collects a very complete body of works, which translate Chiara Fumai’s performances into material form, while respecting the artist’s programmatic intent not to document them. Rebelling against a kind of latent prejudice related to her being a female artist, Chiara Fumai has developed a vocabulary of threat, revolt, violence but also boredom, suitable to trigger uncomfortable situations, in order to promote her ideals of anarchic feminism. Her works, collages, environments and actions, evoke female figures who, through their courage and anger, made their mark only to be excluded or forgotten; these include Annie Jones, the “bearded lady,” and Zalumma Agra, the “Circassian beauty,” both part of the tours of P.T. Barnum, German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, illiterate Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, socialist philosopher and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, feminist writer Carla Lonzi and many others.

A peculiar gallery of portraits that also includes some male figures, such as illusionist Harry Houdini and Nico Fumai, the first fictional and unique character of biographical origin. In fact, it takes the name of the artist’s father to attribute it to a singer, using her interest in theItalo Disco of the 1980s as a strategy to interpret a specific historical era and to bring together different fields of research, including music, to which Chiara Fumai devoted herself, as a DJ, in the early years of her artistic career.

Also on view are two domestic spaces that have marked the artist’s career: The Moral Exhibition House, an environmental installation recreated for the first time since her 2012 exhibition at dOCUMENTA 13 Kassel, in which the house is a space for feminist insurrection in the form of a domestic freak show, and a reproduction of a room in the Milan apartment in which the artist lived crucial years of her adult life. The latter is an ironic self-celebration (planned for one of her possible retrospectives) that contains a selection of clothes and props, books and vinyl records: all documents that come from the artist’s archives, part of which is preserved in Bari by The Church of Chiara Fumai (the body in charge of preserving the artist’s memory and legacy - while another part has been donated to the Castello di Rivoli - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin).

The exhibition at the Pecci in Prato also includes I Did Not Say or Mean “Warning,” a work with which Chiara Fumai won the Furla Prize in 2013, in which she embodies the spirit of an anonymous woman who guides the viewer through the historic art collection of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice; Chiara Fumai reads Valerie Solanas, mock propaganda of the S.C.U.M by Valerie Solanas, reflecting Silvio Berlusconi’s first political campaign; The Book of Evil Spirits, a video installation produced for Contour 7- The Biennial of Moving Image in which the artist documented a series of séances held by Eusapia Palladino, retrospectively rewriting the history of the medium. The artist’s interest in mediumistic experiences, automatic writing and black magic are evidenced by wall drawings, including This Last Line Can Not Be Translated conceived by the artist for the New York Prize, won in 2017, and presented posthumously at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

The aim of the exhibition is to try to capture what Chiara Fumai liked to call her “slavoro”: a decades-long production that goes far beyond the performances for which she was best known. The title of the exhibition is taken from the artist’s last self-portrait: a puppet wearing a T-shirt with the motto Poems I Will Never Release. Although the phrase may sound melancholy in relation to her early death, it actually states a fact: Chiara Fumai based her work on the performance of words written by others. She never composed poetry but channeled the words of others, those of women who needed redemption and historical recognition.

Accompanying the exhibition is a monograph, edited by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Milovan Farronato and Andrea Bellini, published by Nero Editions, which includes critical texts that read Chiara Fumai’s work from different perspectives, as well as an in-depth chronology of her work and a wide and comprehensive selection of images and documentation. The book, published in an Italian edition and an English edition, collects contributions by Irene Aristizábal, Marcello Bellan, Andrea Bellini, Federico Campagna, Sara De Chiara, Milovan Farronato, Gabriel Lester, Raimundas Malašauskas, Chus Martínez, Mara Montanaro, Paulina Olowska, Cristiana Perrella, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and Giovanna Zapperi. The publication is supported by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as part of the Italian Council (2019) program. Poems I Will Never Release at the Pecci Center is realized in partnership with Intesa Sanpaolo.

Image: Chiara Fumai, The Book of Evil Spirits (2015, Production stills). Ph. PRed

A major exhibition on Chiara Fumai, an artist who died at age 39 in 2017, at Pecci in Prato

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