From 2025, April 18 to Octobre 6, the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre presents the exhibition Euforia Tomaso Binga, curated by Eva Fabbris with Daria Kahn, exhibition design Rio Grande: it is her largest museum retrospective presenting the forty years of her artistic practice through more than one hundred and twenty works including visual poems, installations, photographs, collages, documents, and performance testimonies – many of which are being shown for the first time or decades after their first exposure – coming from museums and private collections.
The exhibition’s title emerged during conversations between the artist and Eva Fabbris: Euphoria – a word particularly beloved by Binga because it contains all vowels, phonetically universal and extrovert – becomes ‘a title-manifesto,’ explains the curator, ‘a wish, a political necessity of resistance’ and distinguishes both her approach to verbo-visual practice and feminism.
‘Binga’s work challenges social and cultural conventions,’ says Angela Tecce, president of the Fondazione Donnaregina – by exploring themes related to gender and the critique of language. (…) Emblematic examples of her contribution are the alphabets in which the artist’s body takes on the forms of letters, a synthesis of verbal and visual language.’
The exhibition is the result of two years of research carried out in close collaboration with the artist and her archive, with a thematic itinerary through the eighteen rooms on the third floor of the museum, with an experimental circular layout designed by the multidisciplinary collective Rio Grande in dialogue with Tomaso Binga.
The book accompanying the exhibition, published by Lenz Press in Italian and English, is curated by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal and Stefania Zuliani. It is divided into three parts: the first presents essays and an interview with the artist; the second a series of short critical texts analysing single works or small bodies of work from the artist’s main areas of interest; the third is dedicated to visual poetry. The publication was supported by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture in the framework of the Italian Council (2023) programme with the support of the Associazione Amici del Madre.
(Cover image: Tomaso Binga, Mani-Occhi, 1973, collage and ink on polystyrene, plexiglass. Courtesy Archivio Tomaso Binga, Roma)