WHEN YOU ARE BOUND TO NOTHING, YOU ARE BOUND TO EVERYBODY

Daniel Malarkey is proud to present WHEN YOU ARE BOUND TO NOTHING, YOU ARE BOUND TO EVERYBODY, a group exhibition bringing together works by Adrian Piper, Cosima von Bonin, Anthea Hamilton, Celia Paul, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Anna Calleja, Paz Errázuriz and Derek Jarman, alongside Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Mark Tobey, Piero Marussig and Luis Caballero, at Palazzo Lezze, Campo Santo Stefano, Venice. The exhibition is a retelling of Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), a film which has long resonated with Malarkey, told through the works of artists across different generations and geographies. Following his film on St Francis of Assisi (1950), Rossellini continued to explore questions of faith and spiritual transformation in Stromboli (1950), before returning to them in Europa ’51, where he challenges contemporary society’s capacity to understand sainthood in its own time. Drawing upon the story of Irene, played by Ingrid Bergman, Malarkey brings the works together to evoke the emotional and psychological transformation at the heart of her story. The exhibition takes its title from a line spoken by Irene at a moment of clarity, a line that, for Malarkey, holds the essence of the entire film. First presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1952, Europa ’51 returns to the city where its story first reached an international audience. The exhibition considers the historically fraught relationship between women, faith and social convention, looking to female figures whose rejection of prescribed roles was often met with suspicion, confinement or accusations of madness. This history echoes through an exhibition that deliberately brings together living women artists with works by male artists who are no longer alive. Anthea Hamilton has conceived two new works for the exhibition, extending her recurring exploration of the leg and boot, with both forms modelled on the artist’s own body. Existing somewhere between self-portrait and anonymous female form, the works consider the body as a site of projection, desire and constraint. Derek Jarman’s Do Lalley (1993), one of his best-known late works from his final series Evil Queen, brings defiance and mortality into the conversation, while Pleasures of Italy conceals personal inscriptions relating to love, sexuality, Jungian thought and alchemy. A pair of stained-glass angels by Edward Burne-Jones introduces the sacred, while two paintings by Mark Tobey turn inward, towards states of mind and contemplation. The deeply personal nature of Celia Paul’s practice is reflected in two intimate works: an ethereal portrait of her sister and a painting of an empty chair made immediately following her husband’s death, each revealing the power that lived experience carries within her painting. Paz Errázuriz’s photographs enter the intimate world of transgender sex workers living under Chile’s military dictatorship, capturing the act of changing out of a white dress, whose associations with purity, virginity and the bridal or sacred body are unsettled as the garment is discarded, yet folded with care and love. Claudia Alarcón & Silät offer a different understanding of the individual and the collective: Alarcón steps away from the idea of the artist as singular author, foregrounding the community of Indigenous women with whom she creates her intricate textile works. Across these different histories and experiences, the works hold conflict, pain and the weight of difficult choices, confronting a struggle that is both Irene’s and our own – how much of the self we are willing to relinquish for the other. Venice carries its own history of these contradictions. It is a city profoundly shaped by religious devotion and sacred imagery, but also by a culture in which courtesans occupied an unusually visible place in the intellectual and social life of the Renaissance. Against this history, the exhibition’s questions of faith, autonomy and society feel particularly urgent today. Text by Bella Kesoyan Daniel Malarkey © All Rights Reserved