THROUGH HER LENS

Le immagini come infrastrutture del contemporaneo

THROUGH HER LENS – Images as Infrastructures of the Contemporary is a group exhibition curated by Oliviero Falconi, with exhibition design by Manuela Parrino, bringing together the work of 32 international women artists at U-ART-P in Bergamo and creating a dialogue between pioneering figures and leading voices from more recent generations of contemporary art.

The exhibition takes as its starting point a condition that has become central to our everyday experience: we live immersed in a continuous flow of images, constantly produced, recorded, shared, archived and reprocessed. Within this landscape, the image is no longer simply a means of representing reality, but has become a genuine infrastructure of the contemporary, capable of shaping subjectivities, organising memory, influencing perception and encoding social relations and structures of power.

The title Through Her Lens does not seek to define a gender category, nor does it suggest the existence of a single, essentialised “female gaze.” Instead, the lens becomes a metaphor and a critical device through which to question and deconstruct the regimes of visibility that characterise our present. From this perspective, photography moves beyond the traditional boundaries of the medium, entering into dialogue with video, performance, installation and archival practices. The image thus ceases to be merely a two-dimensional surface and becomes an operational environment in which we are constantly immersed.

The exhibition unfolds as an intergenerational dialogue between the legacy of pioneering figures in contemporary art and photography and the practices of artists from subsequent generations. Through different languages and perspectives, it addresses questions surrounding the body and the construction of identity, memory and the archive, ecologies of perception, the transformation of the photographic medium and the politics of looking.

From the fragmentation and redefinition of the subject found in the work of Francesca Woodman to the tensions between the body, technology and society explored by Cao Fei and Nona Inescu; from the documentary and political force of Letizia Battaglia’s images to the practices of Eva Frapiccini and Yael Bartana, which question the construction of memory and history; and on to reflections on landscape and the relationships between human beings, the environment and systems of perception in the work of Sandra Kantanen, Servane Mary, Sara Messinger, Monica Carocci and Pamela Diamante.

A further trajectory explores the progressive dissolution of photography’s traditional boundaries. The intermedia experiments of artists such as Pipilotti Rist and Cosima von Bonin enter into dialogue with contemporary investigations into technologies of vision and systems of algorithmic surveillance, as in the work of Irene Fenara. Looking, being looked at, producing images and determining how they circulate emerge as anything but neutral acts, reaffirming the profoundly political dimension of the gaze.

THROUGH HER LENS also offers an opportunity to reflect on the evolving presence and role of women throughout art history. Without reducing the works to an exclusively identity-based interpretation, the exhibition highlights a process of emancipation and self-assertion spanning different generations, leading to a present in which these artistic practices stand on the strength of their research, experimentation and critical engagement with reality.