Non Toccare La Donna Bianca [Don’t Touch The White Woman]
16 September – 8 January
www.fondsrr.org
For the Turin-based Fondazione Sandretto Re
Rebaudengo, 2004 was a year dedicated to the work of female artists. Setting
out to explore the politics and realities of women’s shifting position in
society, a series of exhibitions served as a platform showcasing myriad
female voices from different generations. ‘Don’t Touch The White Woman’,
curated by the Fondazione’s Artistic Director Franceso Bonami, became the
final and the largest in this series, gathering the work of 19 artists from
all continents.
The exhibition’s title is taken from the 1974 Italian film by Marco Ferreri,
which positions the white woman as metaphor for the untouchable,
ever-protected Western world. According to Bonami, no museum or institution
in the United States (where he mostly works) would have allowed the
presentation of an exhibition with such a contentious title and subject
matter: ‘In this exhibition, I dare to touch, as a Western curator, the
other woman’.
The title becomes a springboard for Bonami’s exploration of the
contradictions of global attitudes in relationship to gender, territory and
freedom. In the catalogue he asserts that if we were to abuse geographically
significant territories (think regions with oil potential) as much as we
have abused women throughout history, international aid organisations would
have intervened long ago: ‘The woman is a territory for which no war is
launched in the name of democracy and freedom,’ he adds.
Unlike the jumbled terrain of Bonami’s metaphors, the individual works in
the show each assert their own agendas through a range of subject matters,
materials and approaches. Spreading across the entire Fondazione’s vast
exhibition space, the show combines installation, sculpture, film, video and
photography by an equal number of established and emerging artists.
Mona Hatoum’s works engage with notions of access, belonging and the
crossing of boundaries. Doormat II (2000–1) is a doormat made of steel pins
forming the word ‘welcome’, ready to injure anyone that would dare to
believe its warm message and pass across it. Another piece by Hatoum, Every
Door A Wall (2003) consists of a sheer curtain featuring an enormous print
of a Herald Tribune illustrated article depicting illegal immigrants in a
lorry at the Mexican border. The piece is installed between two galleries,
encouraging the visitor to lightly push aside the curtain to get through, a
gesture which highlights the ease and freedom of our own movement in
relation to the impossibility of border crossing efforts depicted in the
article.
Geographical boundaries are the subject of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s
two-screen video installation, Crossing Surda (2002). The piece documents
the artist’s daily journey to work, which leads her across the Surda
checkpoint between Israel and Palestine. Having had her tape confiscated,
the artist resorts to using a hidden camera to document this normally
mundane part of the day, creating a testament of the everyday reality
tainted by military and political conflict.
Meanwhile, young Bulgarian artist Daniela Kostova addresses issues of
displacement with a refreshing simplicity in her video Fixing Reality
(2004). Kostova uses the blue-screen effect to superimpose the daily life of
a Bulgarian city onto the street of an unnamed US city centre, a metaphor
for her own attempts to construct her own reality. The piece is a document
of the artist’s performance in a public space, in which she attempts to
erect a screen that repeatedly collapses on top of her, while passers by
gradually become involved in her efforts. Kostova’s piece embodies the
efforts to construct or, as she puts it, to ‘fix’ her own reality and
identity.
Across the gallery, Shirin Neshat’s visually stunning and highly disturbing
film Possessed (2001) speaks of a different sense of otherness. A woman
ostracised by society for her madness wanders the streets of an unidentified
Islamic city, attaining a new sense of freedom of movement normally denied
to women.
Some of the strongest work in the exhibition comes from African-American
artist Ellen Gallagher, whose work addresses political identity through
issues such as racism and discrimination. Her ongoing focus on wigs as a
sign of cultural significance continues here in a film project. The
five-screen projection Murmur (2003) is a combination of animation and
treated 16mm archive film. By scratching and drawing on top of the original
film footage, Gallagher constructs a series of part-fiction, part-real
narratives populated by figures with mounds of luminous, hand-drawn hair.
Berlinde De Bruyckere’s La Femme Sans Tête (2004) may be the most poignant
embodiment of the notion of otherness in the exhibition. Like a wounded
creature, De Bruyckere’s disfigured, headless being crouches awkwardly
inside a glass cage. A tragic and deflated flesh-coloured shell of a living
being, the figure’s tucks and rips suggest a fuller and happier past life.
Similarly, the installation by pioneering African-American artist Senga
Nengundi also evokes the limitations of the body. Nengundi’s choice of used
materials – stretched, ripped and knotted stockings filled with sand and
earth – speak of tension and weariness, evoking the metamorphosis of a
woman’s body, marked by age and the violence of giving birth.
Each artist addresses the particular conditions pertinent to her own
historical, political and cultural context, and the exhibition is filled
with strong voices. Bonami’s insistence on fuelling the supposed controversy
of the title feels like an overzealous attempt to admit to the awkwardness
of this project, while his musings on the white woman ring as artificially
constructed and entirely divorced from the works in the exhibition. But what
is most puzzling of all is Bonami’s notion of a ‘female language’, which he
refers to when describing the purported ‘shared’ reality of the female
artists in the exhibition – a reality to which he, as a man, claims to feel
alien. ‘Being a woman expresses a reality alien to my sensibility,’ he
declares in the exhibition essay. ‘I do not understand them as they probably
do not understand me.’
The exhibition above all spells out the utter impossibility of the ‘they’
that Bonami speaks of. If there is one thing that emerges, it is the
futility of presenting a shared experience organised solely according to
gender. Bonami’s thesis about gender and territory may serve as a useful
illustration of the hypocrisy inherent in the international political
landscape, but ‘Don’t Touch The White Woman’ represents a failure to view
universal human experience and an over keenness to problematise an issue
that is in no way present in the work in the show.
Lina Dzuverovic