Galleria Tiziana Di Caro presents the third solo exhibition in its spaces by Tomaso Binga (alias Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, Salerno, 1931), opening Saturday 17 October 2020, from 11:00 a.m. To 7:00 p.m.

The exhibition spans a creative period that ranges from 1972 to 2020, with works that reflect on the performance aspect of Binga’s work and on her penchant for collaboration and sharing, pointing out how many of her projects are the result of meeting and collaborating with women who are at times known, at others completely unknown.

The exhibition opens with a series of photographs that testifies the first performance that Binga ever created, Vista Zero from 1972. In this piece, the artist's body is totally covered by a white sheet a gauze covers the head,  leaving her sensory organs  uncovered. The action consists in the artist applying on her face paper cutouts of eyes. The cutouts are of different sizes and the largest are placed on the artist’s forehead. Binga’s face is completely covered to the point of preventing her seeing: metaphor of a world that was open to the thousand glances of the new media, potential tools for quiescence of brains.

The second room of the gallery will be partly covered in photocopies applied to the walls like wallpaper. In the middle of the room there is a plinth which houses a couple of diaries: the oldest is dated 1895, the least old 1995.

Diario Romano 1895 – 1995 [Roman Diary] is a work on which Binga works for a year and which she exhibits for the first time in 1996. In an antique shop the artist buys a diary dated 1895. It is the diary of a lady who Binga starts to investigate the identity of, finding out that she was of Sicilian descent, had been associated with the Roman nobility, and had had a Neapolitan husband. Binga’s action does not end with the identification of the woman. For one year (1995) she writes a diary herself, to show how after one hundred years there are customs that pertain to women that keep reoccurring, outlining their lives in a precise way. The photocopies with which the walls are covered reproduce the pages of the two diaries. 

In the third room, Binga exhibits one of her latest works, again made in collaboration with a woman, but whose identity this time is unknown. In August 2017 the artist receives every day a photograph by email. These are photographs of landscapes, meetings, events that occurred during those days over the whole month. This mysterious woman’s idea is to keep Binga company from a distance, telling her about her daily life during the summer holidays through her photographs. Each of these photos (there are thirty-one, the same number as the days in the month of August) is printed out and manipulated by the artist through collage, to then be printed again on canvas. A complex elaboration aiming at producing a synthesis of the two actions: the pictures taken by the woman and the collages created by Binga become a single work.

In the last room, the artist’s inclination for sharing and collaborating takes a further step as Binga offers the space to other women artists she has selected and intends to support. The idea is that within each project she will carry out from now on, there will always be a part of her exhibition space she will leave for the works of other women to be exhibited. This is the way in which the artist gives her welcome, becomes a promoter, a mentor.

Born from the desire to return to a necessary active participation between artists of different generations, Transumanze Creative (Creative Transhumance)is a project in continuous movement and updating that places at the center of attention the desire to return to dialogue, debate, plural actions to be reinvented and reinvigorated through the unifying force of art.

It is, in particular, a process of active and interactive involvement, of a multi – voice speech, which starts from an artist whose will is to create a union and so to reverse the airtight closure of the solo exhibitions into a convivial opening, in a space of welcome and hospitality, in a tolerance path, in a participation and involvement relationship, in a mutual respect, in polyphonic pleasure! (Tomaso Binga)

On the occasion of the first step of the project Transumanze Creative, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro will host works by Elvi Ratti and Grazia Menna.

Tomaso Binga (Salerno, 1931) takes on her pseudonym to contest, with irony and displacement, the privileges of the male world. She deals with verbal-visual writing and is one of the leading figures in Italian phonetic-sound-performative poetry.

Recent exhibitions include: “Per-formare una collezione” [To Per-form a Collection], MADRE Museum, Naples (2013); “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”, Prada Foundation, Milan (2017); “The Body as Language. Body Art and Performance. What is left,” curated by Paola Ugolini, Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome (2017); “Chi ha paura del disegno?” [Who’s afraid of drawing?], 20TH CENTURY ITALIAN WORKS ON PAPER, Museo del Novecento, Milan; “Il Soggetto Imprevisto. 1978 Arte e Femminismo in Italia”, FM Centro per l’arte contemporanea, Milan (2019); “Tomaso Binga: A Silenced Victory”, Mimosa House, London (2019); “Doing Deculturalization,” curated by Ilse Lafer, MUSEION, museum of modern and contemporary art,, Bolzano (2019); “This is my body – My body is your body – My body is the body of the word,” Le Delta, Namur (2019); “Scrivere disegnando – When Language Seeks Its Other,” Center d'art contemporain Genève (2020) “Radio-Activity - Collective Approaches to Art and Politics,” Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in München (2020).