Censurae

Italiano English

from April 14th, 2023 – to May 12th, 2023

a collettive exhibition by Rossella della Vecchia & Vania Caruso

ROME – Galleria 291 EST presents Censurae, a collective exhibition on censorship action and its contemporary manifestations, from April 14th to May 12th, 2023

Paradoxical and selfish, fickle and imponderable, therefore, unpredictable, and indeterminable, contemporary censorship imputes us as unconscious censors! And it is precisely our censorial (in)sensitivity that underlines a general obscurantist advance both in an anachronistic incitement to regime propaganda and in a good social custom.

However, today the fragile common idealism also feeds other forms of censorship, perfectly inscribed in the idiosyncrasy of supposed Western democracies as well as in the compulsive engulfment of mass media and social networks, in forms, languages and proportions that have expanded their dark areas, making their border even more subtle. An indicative present, which, in the drift of free thought and its critical construction, reminds us how possible restrictions, if not real prohibitions, declared or not, perceived or not, are lurking.

Thus, Censurae was born, whose title, derived from the Latin homograph, confirms the peremptory nature of the call for action of Galleria 291 EST. Curated by Rossella Della Vecchia and Vania Caruso, this collective exhibition on censorship action concerns (also) art, in its dual meaning of free expression to be preserved, as well as an aesthetic-philological tool of its time. In this sense, the artists involved will showcase a series of real instances, both in a Manifesto, as well as in performance art, in knitting digital art, in video-art, in an animated video, in a playful action, in an art-book, in informal art, in drawing, illustration, collage, digital collage and in some gadgets, designed as real works of art.

In all these works that the spectator-actor will be able to trace a denunciation of cancel culture, the woke rhetoric, the polarized society, the standardized single thought, patriarchy and its social vision, the idea of being binary, false modesty, body-shaming, commodification of the body, self-censorship, branding of the cultural system and art, to the censorship of language, to the drift of the process of inclusivity, to the deep-rooted phenomenon of functional illiteracy, to the trivialization of content through social media, to media exposure, to sharenting, to a (deliberately) failed educational system.

Censurae will be the heterogeneous gaze of the artists Massimiliano Amati, Annabella Cuomo, Simone Lucciola, Andro Malis -his fanzine Nextasy 06 has been reworked for the promotional graphics of the event- Cristina Piciacchia,, Paolo Scarfone Marco Scola and Federica Terracina; with the international participation of the Italian-Greek Irene Albino and the Swedish Ellen Jonsson, the Chinese Triss (Yingzi) Qian, the Japanese Kawamura Gun and the consolidated incursion of his iconic Shy Nudists, who have always ascribed the theme of censorship to false common modesty. Finally, Censurae will also be the performance of Chiara Mu to close the vernissage, which will be held on Friday 14 April 2023.