Daniela Comani
Daniela Comani’s multimedia installations engage in a dialog about history, language, identity, alienation, and intimacy. Her work focuses on media images and text, which she manipulates through photography and video, and combines in her drawings and installations. For example, her 2008 New Publications series appropriated book cover images from the Western Canon with their titular gender assignments reversed.
In response to canonical lists like the AFI Top 100, Comani created her own list of timeless film masterpieces and illustrated that list with the movie posters for each film. In Daniela Comani’s Top 100 Films, however, gender assignments are reversed: Bunuel’s Belle de Jour becomes Beau du Jour, and Catherine Deneuve is suddenly mustachioed. All the President’s Men becomes All The President’s Women, the lovely Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford now wear red lipstick. Comani intends the series to unfold slowly, one by one, like a wave of historical reversals. At first glance a witty feminist subversion, collectively the pieces drive moments of recognition of where woman exist in film history, and where they do not. Film narratives are reconsidered along gender lines – what if the Godfather was a woman, or Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown …
Daniela Comani’s multimedia installations engage in a dialog about history, language, identity, alienation, and intimacy. Her work focuses on media images and text, which she manipulates through photography and video, and combines in her drawings and installations. For example, her 2008 New Publications series appropriated book cover images from the Western Canon with their titular gender assignments reversed.
In response to canonical lists like the AFI Top 100, Comani created her own list of timeless film masterpieces and illustrated that list with the movie posters for each film. In Daniela Comani’s Top 100 Films, however, gender assignments are reversed: Bunuel’s Belle de Jour becomes Beau du Jour, and Catherine Deneuve is suddenly mustachioed. All the President’s Men becomes All The President’s Women, the lovely Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford now wear red lipstick. Comani intends the series to unfold slowly, one by one, like a wave of historical reversals. At first glance a witty feminist subversion, collectively the pieces drive moments of recognition of where woman exist in film history, and where they do not. Film narratives are reconsidered along gender lines – what if the Godfather was a woman, or Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown were men? This kind of detournement is typical of Comani’s practice: In previous projects she has applied her subversive touch to the Western literary canon, to contemporary European magazine, and in fact to the key events of the twentieth century.
The artist’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna and the 54th Venice Bienniale .
Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery