The Reading Room by Daniela Comani presents several bodies of works and a site-specific installation conceived and produced especially for her solo exhibition at the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz in Berlin. The diverse works present a dialogue on gender, stereotypes,femicide, and the interpretation of language through the use of the text-image and photography.
These series aim to heighten the awareness about violence and power dynamics and their structural sources embedded in language and in socio-political and gender inequalities.
Comani’s text based works and installation are conceived to underline linguistically generated discrimination and clichés that are (re-) produced by the media and in print.
These works include multilingual, comparative studies between languages, sparking a conversation about gender inequality in Europe from a feminist perspective and shedding light on worrying data related to violence against women.
For the exhibition, Comani produced 11 new text-based works from her series You Are Mine based on accounts of femicide in German and international press articles. The works are a continuation of the series concerning the same crime in Italy, produced and presented by the artist at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in 2022.
In the ongoing series, the artist collects articles related to real acts of violence against women that dominate headlines in the media, manipulating them by reversing the gender of the subjects. This linguistic shift – turning perpetrators into victims and vice versa – is an exercise in practical feminist linguistics and triggers a shock by placing a new focus on the absurdity of femicide.
The video work Reversal Exercise reveals the working process of the series You Are Mine: We see a computer screen and watch as a cursor changes the gender in reports about femicide in real time. Here the viewer takes the place of the artist sitting behind a screen and witnesses how the narrative swiftly and dramatically changes with a simple yet subversive gesture.
The large-scale, site-specific installation Orlando’s Library, dedicated in title to Virginia Woolf’s genderfluid heroine Orlando, features photographs of bookshelves with over 300 digitally-placed books (from Comani’s series “New Publications edited by Daniela Comani” 2007-ongoing) whose titles the artist manipulates by changing the gender of the named protagonists: Le Petit Prince becomes La Petite Princesse, and The Old Man and the Seabecomes The Old Woman and the Sea.
A selection of the ongoing-series Cover Versions will also be presented, where the artist reenacts cover images from political magazines such as Der Spiegel and Time, posing as the protagonist of the headlines with self-portraits, like a media diary.
The new artist book “You Are Mine” by Daniela Comani – published by Monroe Books – will be released on the occasion of the exhibition and will be presented within its frame.
On the occasion of the show a special urban intervention conceived by Daniela Comani will be presented on the billboard in Torstrasse – corner of Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, Berlin.
