The solo exhibition of the South African artist Turiya Magadlela (Johannesburg 1978) – Dancing Under the Sun – will be opening on Tuesday March 18th in the Galleria Anna Marra in Rome.
The exhibition, curated by Alessandro Romanini, represents another step along Anna Marra’s path to discovering the most original forms of expression in international contemporary art.

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In the gallery’s spaces at Via S. Angelo in Pescheria 32, the visitor will find the results of two decades of coherent research and experimentation by Turiya Magadlela on themes linked to gender, race, interpersonal relations and the exercise of power, as she translates these in her original way, using multi-colour pantyhose modified and joined by embroidery.

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The material and techniques used by Magadlela, pantyhose and stitching, directly related to an intimate and domestic dimension of feminine identity, guide the observer to a participatory reflection on the dynamics of intersectional racism.
To fully understand her work, one should view it from the “privileged” observation point of South Africa, where the black population has only had equal rights for thirty years, following forty years of apartheid, discrimination and every type of repression, which, in various ways, have left a lingering stamp also in the present.
Turiya Magadlela has transformed pantyhose into a symbol of violated female intimacy, the economic exploitation of women, with allusions also to a colonial past, though it is a phenomenon that concerns not only South African but the world.
Magadlela applies an expressive formula in which the action of the embroidery and sewing surpass the dynamics of gender and economic exploitation, to become a vehicle which is interpreted by humanity’s collective memory in a political-cultural and mythological environment, to site a few examples: the famous Arianna of Greek myth, Arachne in Ovid, the Woman Spider of native Americans, the Japanese goddess Amaterasu, the Nornes of Nordic mythology and finally the “sutra” (threads) of the Indian Rig Veda.
The artist’s work contains themes linked to autobiographical dimensions, like maternity and self-affirmation which she raises to a universal valence and the materials she uses take on the symbolic value of ransom for the commodification to which the female body is subjected in the context of our globalised society. The artist gives symbolism to the garments through her sewing, using her valences of union and mending.

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The exhibition Dancing Under the Sun offers visitors the possibility to see works by Magadlela. Works that meld the canons of painting with those of sculpture, as well as joining the dimensions of ethics and aesthetics, expression and activism as she creates her extremely personal formula that has earned her the attention of critics and insiders. This appreciation has seen her participating in prestigious events such as the “Blue Black” exhibition curated by Glenn Ligon at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis in 2017 and “Planet B, Climate Change and the New Sublime”, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in Palazzo Bollani in Venice in 2022.
 

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ITA

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