La Passione

Fotogalleriet is pleased to present the extensive group exhibition La Passione, a project by Marianne Heier.  La Passione is a research-based endeavour project that stems from several years of conversations between the artist and the institution about Italian radical feminism and its special, close relationship with the visual arts and, especially photography. Consisting of an intergenerational and transhistorical overview —archival documentation, artworks, notes and other material— this unique presentation aims to shed light on cogent contemporary issues of biased genders’ norms and current resurging fascisms, in Italy and abroad, to address structural violence and where we decide to stand today.

Marianne Heier, a performance artist educated and imbued in the Italian academic context in the 1990s, enters La Passione in dialogue with feminist works from the 1970s and 1980s, up until today. Photography was quintessential for the rebellious generation of the 1960s and 1970s in finding a voice that didn’t need powerful and inaccessible museums for uttering one’s right to speak. Collective actions, performance, rioting, and pamphletting, go hand in hand with photo-based formats in a field where financial resources are scarce, political pressure is great and the patriarchal artistic genius holds the space and the budgets of museums, often devoted to painting and sculpture only.

The exhibition brings and bridges Italian feminist history into Norway to point out that the equality struggle never ended, and still, to the decades past the achievement of equal and fundamental gender rights in the 1970s, from this day, feminicide and violence against women and gender non-conforming bodies remains the unquestioned standard unconnected to forceful family ties, a dictatorship of gender and reproduction bundle by a pretense of tradition and traditional families.