Silvia Giambrone Biography

With a practice that encompasses performance, installation, photography, sculpture and sound, Silvia Giambrone explores contemporary body politics, with a particular focus on violence against women, both physical and phycological. Employing an almost ethnographic approach, Giambrone casts a critical gaze on the traditional domestic environment and excavates the inherent yet often hidden power dynamics between men and women. By addressing the social taboo of domestic violence, Giambrone positions herself next to a long line of historical feminists - from Helen Chadwick and Judy Chicago to Margaret Harrison, Linder and Gina Pane - who used art as a vehicle to uproot inequality within the household and workplace and to challenge social stereotypes associated with women and confront fixed identities. Like these seminal figures, Giambrone magnifies a deeper, more insidious thread of the female condition. Heavily influenced by the writer Carla Lonzi, who together with Carla Accardi formed one of the most radical Feminist Movements in Italy in the late 1970s, Giambrone digs into the heavily shrouded arena of violence, attempting to understand and unearth humanity's tendency towards brutality whilst simultaneously calling into question its domestication and normalisation.