The Other: A Familiar Story
Dates: 8 May - 8 August, 2021
Location: Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany
Solo show curated by Kristina Scepanski
(…) For the installation in the space, Rapicavoli shows the two-channel video on two projection surfaces that hang at an obtuse angle to one another in the middle of the space, allowing us to walk around and view it from different angles. Objects that can also be seen in the video – partly as props, partly as found objects – are scattered around the room. Via large mirrors, the exhibition space and cinematic space become blurred.
In the small exhibition space, the artist continues this approach, but concentrates here on the representation of a mental arena. As if speculating on Mena’s interior state: defamiliarised residues of memories of her Sicilian homeland are juxtaposed with familiar domestic furniture which is, however, wonky, precarious and unsafe.
In the adjacent black cabinet, Rapicavoli shows a series of eighteen small-format photographs that she managed to take in the textile factory during the video shoot in Lawrence. Hidden on the roof of the abandoned factory building where Mena worked were a number of drawings and carvings in the wooden beams, some dating from the 1920s through to the 1940s, depicting mainly naked women. Here, too, we witness the predominant image of women through the male gaze. Men and women worked in the factory – but there was no sign of equality between colleagues in terms of either mutual respect or pay. A carefully crafted depiction of a woman seems to have been drawn by a female hand and was rounded off with the caption “What am I?” And meanwhile, the video in the main room ends with the sentence: “This story keeps on getting written.”
This “story” of migration, oppression, misogyny and economic inequality still feels far too familiar to us today, a century later. The video's reference to the catastrophic Spanish flu outbreak after the First World War even allows us to draw parallels to our current pandemic, in the wake of which we all too clearly see history repeating itself. The artist's approach of generalising an individual fate and rendering it palpable (instead of merely intellectually comprehensible), and thus recognising its cause as something eminently structural, can be a beginning for a further sensitisation and call to arms for us w to tell those stories that can ultimately challenge the dominant narrative, the absolute”.
Text by Kristina Scepanski. Click here to read the full version
Source: https://www.westfaelischer-kunstverein.de/en/exhibitions/archive/2021/maria-drapicavoli/
