Any Questions?

Curated by Isabella Tupone e Francesco Mancini

Milano, galleria Area\B
March 5 – May 10, 2024
Opening: Tuesday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.

From March 5 to May 10, 2024, Milan’s Area\B gallery presents the exhibition “Any Questions?” an all-female group show curated by Isabella Tupone and Francesco Mancini, featuring 20 works – most of them previously unpublished – signed by Chiara Baima Poma, Irene Balia, Loredana Galante, Laura Giardino and Sarah Ledda.

The title “Any questions?” quotes the phrase that closes Margaret Atwood’s famous 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” that has become a symbol of women’s emancipation: set in the fictional Republic of Gilead, it deals with the theme of women’s subjugation in an environment that judges them on the basis of their fertility, considering them as mere objects. But that’s not all: at the heart of this literary work we find profound reflections on female solidarity, the characteristics of a patriarchal society, and the loss of rights and related freedoms.

The five invited artists, different in age and education, give their own vision of these themes – always topical and unfortunately never outdated – through personal poetics and different registers.

Loredana Galante (Genoa, 1970) is exhibiting her delicate embroideries: a practice that has always been linked to the world of women, a female prerogative even in Atwood’s novel, which in the Genoese artist becomes a technique for a contemporary narrative: that of the denial of the exposure of the body, the almost constant compulsion to cover oneself, the inability to speak freely about sexuality lest one be judged “unladylike.” In Galante’s works, the protagonists are proud of their beauty and physicality, claiming the right to show themselves, express themselves, undress, be.