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Monica Bonvicini

09.22.06 - 10.15.06
Installation — Couvent des Jacobins

Monica Bonvicini, Stonewall, 2001
200 x 520 x 447 cm; exhibition view at Les Jacobins

Courtesy Mehdi Chouakri Gallery, Berlin
© Printemps de septembre 2006, photo André Morin

Born in 1965 in Venice (Italy), she lives between Los Angeles and Berlin.

 

Monica Bonvicini is a radical, feminist artist whose targets are architecture and the modernist discourse as an expression of male domination. For her, the wall represents the prison within which the macho architect confines woman. The artist came to notice in 1995 with her film Wallfucking in which a naked woman masturbates against a wall, used quite literally as a phallic object. In 1997, Housewife Swinging shows the same naked woman, with the model of a suburban house on her head, which she bangs against the wall. Carrying on her line of thought about the gendered and sexual nature of architecture, since the late 1990s Monica Bonvicini has been producing installations using chains and galvanized steel tubes which make reference to the world of sado-masochism. While drawing inspiration from Minimalist sculpture, she uses to her own ends the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and their critique of the museum cube which fetishizes art.

 

For les Jacobins, she adapted her 2001 play, Stonewall, which creates an enclosed space of iron and glass.