Monica Biancardi. The Catalogue of Huts

Saturday 21 January 2023, from 4.00 pm, the Shazar Gallery presents THE CATALOG OF HUTS by Monica Biancardi, the second solo exhibition of the Neapolitan artist, based in Rome, in the gallery in via Pasquale Scura.

The new project, created exclusively, is a graphic narration, punctuated by geographical maps, statistical data, engravings and scratches that outline the story of a pain hidden by transparent surfaces. Only light and shadows reveal the reality of the hut, no longer a refuge but a prison, no longer a place but a symbolic object, a nightmare space rendered by Biancardi with light poetry, with a childish language that opens us to reflections on female conditions.

The artist's denunciation starts from the period of the lockdown displayed in a paper map in which the highlighted areas and the dates indicating their closure, report the increased risk for women. The work, born as a global mapping in which the countries take on the appearance of huts and show percentage numbers inside them (which, preceded by a + sign, designate the growth, compared to the previous year, of reports of abuse or mistreatment of women ) produces a distorted mapping: too many countries – democratic and otherwise – declare completely misleading percentages. The result is the completely bogus and hypocritical character of the statistic, which here as in other cases goes hand in hand with ideology, disguised as a scientific product.

The work is accompanied by a series of drawings of huts engraved on paper, bearing witness to a world catalogue, and by drawings of some everyday products engraved on plexiglass, represented as double-edged weapons attacking the female sphere.

Monica Biancardi, Naples 1972, graduated in scenography with an experimental thesis on theater photography. You start working for important directors (carrying out the activity of teacher at the same time) carrying out personal researches at the same time. Her first Credere, twenty years of black / white gazes in southern Italy, was partly purchased together with various other works, by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and in 2014 invited to the official program of the Mois de la Photo in Paris. The first public exhibition is Portraits, inaugurated in Naples in 2003 and then continued around Europe winning various prizes, so much so that Achille Bonito Oliva invited her to design an entire cell inside the Certosa di Padula, during the review "The Works and days". In 2018, on the occasion of the Ritratti exhibition at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere, the volume manodopera was published by the Contrasto publishing house. “Dolore”, part of the Aldilà artistic project, was acquired by the new Naples Metro and installed in the Lala stop. In 2006 she exhibited at Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples Mutamenti, dedicated to her father (cat. Electa). Sensitive to the theme of cultural integration, for the Al Quds University of Jerusalem, Monica exhibits the work she has done for years in Palestine (cat. Al Quds University) and then in multimedia form at the MAV of Ercolano Among the images. In 2009, at the invitation of the Superintendency of Naples, you created a major exhibition entitled Orientamenti at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples (cat. Shin Art). In October 2012 the MART invited her to exhibit the Habitus project. In 2015 you won the DolomitiArteContemporanee Award. In 2017 she published for the publishing house Damiani RiMembra, a project that lasted more than seven years in which the poet Gabriele Frasca collaborates. The work is exhibited at the Nitsch Museum in Naples, at the I.I.C. in Paris during Paris-Photo, at the Santa Maria della Scala Museum in Siena and was chosen to represent La Biennale de la Photographie Italienne at the Aubagne festival in 2018.
In March 2019 you inaugurate the Punti di Vista project at the Shazar Gallery in Naples. One of the polyptychs is acquired by the MADRE of Naples. Her works are present in many private collections of contemporary art.