Tomaso Binga
Courtesy Tomaso Binga and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro
Lux Simonetta, Zeuli Maria Francesca (ed.), Tomasa Binga: autoritratto di un matrimonio, exh. cat., Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea dell’Università La Sapienza, Rome (10 February–26 February 2005), Rome, Gangemi, 2005
Tomasa Binga: autoritratto di un matrimonio, MLAC – Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea dell’Università “La Sapienza”, Roma, 10 February–26 February 2005
→Tomaso Binga “Scivere non è descrivere” [Writing Is Not Describing], Galleria Tiziana Di Caro, Naples, 29 September–5 December 2015
→Tomaso Binga, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro, Naples, 7 December 2016–11 March 2017
Italian artist and writer.
Tomaso Binga (who was married to the art critic Filiberto Menna) explained that she chose a male pseudonym in order to parody the cultural privileges reserved for men. This ploy to discredit the art world, passing by way of a disguised sexual identity (a theme which occurs throughout her work), started with a demystification of the difference between the sexes in writing and language. She lives in Rome, where, since 1970, she has carried on her tireless activity involving the organization of avant-garde events with performances, collages, video and sonic poetry works, and painting, involving nothing less than a contamination of codes—writing, gestures, bodies, signs, sounds and images—, very frequently pushed to the limits of meaninglessness, as, for example, in E non uscire di casa [And don’t leave the house](1977), Abecedario (1981), Indovina cos’è [Guess what it is] (1987), Rimerotiche [Erotic rhymes] (1992) and Vorrei essere un vigile urbano [I’d like to be a traffic policeman].
Like nothing less than a midwife of images, Binga displays a provocative spirit and unusual opinions, but in order to understand her very varied method of invention, both playful and committed, we must refer not so much to a repetition of futurist tests, as to the anti-sexist themes of the difference between the sexes, psychoanalysis applied to language, and oedipal archetypes. In her countless works and performances, what is invariably involved is a happy sexual liberation of words, with the help of refrains, stereotypes, riddles and a material dissemination of signs.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2017
