Penelope – Her Journeys

Comunicato stampa

Description: Penelope was a subversive weaver, an artist ahead of her time. She transformed the only means of expression granted to women (the loom) into a weapon of resistance. Her endless canvas was not an exercise in patience during the long wait for her adventurous husband, but a project of sabotage against the established order; it is the strategic gaze of someone who, with intelligence and cunning, governs time rather than suffering it.
Penelope is not just a mythical figure, the result of a specific vision of the world, history, and the role of women in society, the archetype of the ideal woman sculpted by the male gaze, which yesterday, as today, imposes its voice.
Since the time of Homer's myth, Penelope has emerged as a figure fighting for her own self-determination. She is a woman who attempts to redesign and choose her own destiny, escaping what tradition would have already written for her: the petrified role of faithful, virtuous woman, devoted wife and mother, guardian of the hearth.
With the exhibition Penelope. Her Journeys, we want to nurture this extraordinary image of femininity, proposing a reversal of perspective, giving centrality to the female figure and voice to her story.
Who, then, is Penelope for the three artists, Gayle Chong Kwan, Stephanie Blake, and Kimiko Yoshida, called upon to confront the myth? She is not the emblem of obedience, but a radically different woman, seeking her own freedom, her own space for expression, and her own identity, an artist like them, who transforms experience into language. The three contemporary artists' view of this archetypal female figure gives us a complex and multifaceted interpretation of the role of women and artists today.
In this vision, the walls of Palazzo Bonvicini cease to be a domestic boundary, where tradition would have women spend their entire lives feeding and caring for their families, and become a battlefield and a space for creative affirmation.
In the works on display, Penelope stops weaving and starts telling stories. She is a woman who speaks out, a fighter who decides her own destiny and relationships, becoming the author of her own myth.
Here we are not celebrating a figure from the past, but the beginning of a new mythology: one in which Penelope's voice is, at last, the voice of all women.