CURA.

For the first time, the work of Chiara Fumai (Rome, 1978 – Bari, 2017) is featured in a major retrospective exhibition. Four years after her premature death, a group of institutions pays tribute to the artist, preserving her legacy and presenting it to a wide international audience. Poems I Will Never Release 2007–2017 fully covers her short, intense career, through an almost all-encompassing selection of works, some of which have never been exhibited before. The event thus plays a decisive role in the exploration of a creative personality that made a major contribution to the development of languages of performance and feminist aesthetics of the 21st century, covering what the artist liked to call her “unwork,” produced in many forms that go well beyond the practice of performance, for which she is known best, to include videos, collages, installations and wall paintings.

Born in Rome on 22 February 1978, Chiara Fumai grew up in Bari; in 1999 she took a degree in architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, after which she focused first on design and then on activities as a DJ and organizer of music events. After initial experiences in the art world with videos and installations, she shifted for the most part towards performance. In an ironic game of fiction and reality, her actions summon up female figures from the past who struggled to make their voices heard, such as the medium Eusapia Palladino, the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, the terrorist Ulrike Marie Meinhof, the feminist writer Carla Lonzi, all the way to the anarchist pasionaria Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. Sophisticated anti-heroines, tenaciously driven by tenets of feminism, revolutionaries or disruptors, alternate with a few but significant male figures like Harry Houdini, illusionist and escape artist, or Nico Fumai, the father of the artist. With solemnity, radicality and irresistible wit, through herself and her work Chiara Fumai brings their stories to light, conveying profound re- flections on language and the fragmentation of identity.