Marzia Migliora: Seven Imaginative Exhibitions
Marzia Migliora. Seven Imaginative Exhibitions 1993-2024 is the first monograph of the artist. Curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi and Matteo Lucchetti, published by Nero in a bilingual edition (Italian and English), the book is produced by Looking Forward and realised with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023). It gathers over thirty years of the artist’s production.
It includes texts and exhibitions on paper curated by Diana Campbell, Anna Cestelli Guidi, Francesca Comisso and Nicoletta Leonardi, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Matteo Lucchetti, Adrian Piper, and Andrea Viliani; and contributions by Eva Brioschi, Emanuele Coccia, Marzia Migliora, Elena Pugliese, Davide Quadrio, and Vandana Shiva.
Conceived as a concept book in which the body of works is reinterpreted through seven recurring themes in Marzia Migliora’s practice, the book consists of seven exhibitions on paper, each curated by different curators who envisioned them in emblematic locations within the artist’s biography, thereby configuring a personal emotional geography that spans Italy—from her birthplace of Alessandria to the salt mines of Sicily. The exhibitions are informed by themes such as rurality, the museum as a place of classification, devices for viewing and perceiving reality, community-building, extractivism, patriarchal oppression, and finally, interspecies metamorphoses related to the passage between life and death.
Regarding the selection process for the works, the book’s curators, Cestelli Guidi and Lucchetti, state: “To highlight the evolution and formal eclecticism of the works—from photography to performance, including video, installations, drawings, and collages—we decided to maintain a chronological approach within each imaginary exhibition, covering the three decades in question. Each exhibition begins with images drawn from previously unseen photographic works from the early 1990s, selected from the artist’s extensive archive, and ends with recent installation projects.” On the choice of title, they specify: “We called the exhibitions immaginifiche (imaginative) rather than simply imaginary because, by juxtaposing works from different contexts and moments of the artist’s practice, they are capable of generating new images and visions of these ‘first thirty years’ of Marzia Migliora’s career.”
Project realised with the support of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023). Other sponsors:Archivorum, Collezione La Gaia. Cultural Partners: Fondazione Torino Musei for MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale di Torino; Museo delle Civiltà, Rome; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka.