The title of the exhibition Non Toccare la Donna Bianca (Don’t Touch the White Woman) is taken from the 1974 film by Italian director Marco Ferreri: a biting satire in which the Battle of Little Bighorn is re-staged against the backdrop of contemporary Paris. While the clash of cultures is made more extreme by the choice of setting, the film also reflects on the role of women as symbols of diversity and liberation in contemporary life. The works include a variety of media from painting and video to installation and photography and many will be site specific for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo space in Turin.The sense of stretching any pre-conceived boundaries is very much reflected in the work of the female artists in the show. For example, Shirin Neshat is one of the first Islamic contemporary women to have achieved international acclaim through her photographs and video installations that interpret social and political issues surrounding women in Iran while the Bulgarian artist Daniela Kostova makes works in a variety of media, including performance, which deal with issues of cultural, psychological, technological and physical borders. With some of the artists, the materials used in constructing the work also transform any familiar understanding of their physicality. The three-dimensional work of Israeli artist Carmit Gil makes visible the cultural significance of certain everyday objects or structures that we might otherwise take for granted. The installations of Senga Nengudi, the African American artist and performer, are created from a combination of natural and found objects including dirt, rocks, seed pods as well as women’s tights and masking tape. Francesco Bonami explains: “if, in his film, Ferreri identified the ‘white woman’ with the Western world and its mad genocides of other minorities and populations, the exhibition Non Toccare la Donna Bianca particularly looks at the meaning of the words from the title “don’t touch”, or rather the orders enforced by Western society, because of its economic power, on the rest of the world.The artists who have been invited to take part in this exhibition are from a diverse range of cultures originating in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. They do not focus exclusively on their female identity; their art is political not because it directly confronts any political issues as such, but because the nature of their artistic language re-configures and dissolves certain pre-conceived boundaries established by certain western hegemonies.”
Participating artists
Micol Assael, Maja Bajevic, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Marlene Dumas, Ellen Gallagher, Carmit Gil, Fernanda Gomes, Lyudmila Gorlova, Mona Hatoum, Michal Helfman, Emily Jacir, Koo Jeung-a, Daniela Kostova, Senga Nengudi, Shirin Neshat, Shirana Shabazi, Valeska Soares, Nobuko Tsuchiya, Shen Yuan
