FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive presents, from 30 June to 20 August 2023 , at Palazzo Santa Margherita, the collective exhibition Come tu mi voglio , conceived by the class of ICON 2022 - Course for contemporary image curators of the FMAV Higher Education School, who, at the end of the training course, had the opportunity to deal with the works of great artists from the prestigious collections managed and valued by FMAV.

As you want me borrows, and pays homage to, the title of the play written by Luigi Pirandello in 1929, to investigate the meaning of the relationships that come into play in an image between the represented subject and the author who represents him. The protagonist of Pirandello's drama is "The Unknown", a young woman we know only through the stereotyped vision of the characters who cross her path who identify her on the basis of the social construction they would like her to be. His true identity and subjectivity, as well as his name, remain elusive and ambiguous throughout the work. As in drama, the exhibition proposes a reflection on the original ambivalence of the sense of identity, which is always formed within a relational process, and of its representation in the form of an image.

The exhibition itinerary develops these themes in two large sections through photographic works, videos and drawings by various national and international artists selected for the occasion from the FMAV collections.

The first room presents the works of Jonny Briggs, Wong Hoy Cheong, Lilly Lulay, Giulio Paolini, Barbara Probst, Trine Søndergaard, Vivan Sundaram, Franco Vaccari, Gillian Wearing, . The works presented here question the value of representation as authentic proof of the subjectivities they depict, revealing the construction of the very process of image-making, through the use of various expedients: disguises, doublings, manipulations, estrangements, unveiling of multiple points of view or annulling authorial subjectivity.

The artists selected for the second part of the exhibition, on the other hand, reappropriate their image and represent themselves as they intend to be recognized, forcefully declaring a fluid identity, neither taken for granted nor pre-established by socio-cultural instances. The emancipated and self-aware exposure, as in the works of Jodi Bieber, Alexandra Croitoru, Samuel Fosso, Ma Liuming, Milica Tomić, or of the subject portrayed in Mario De Biasi, Cao Fei, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Fernand Michaud, Claudio Parmiggiani, Salvatore Spatarella, Edward Weston, displaces the observer, triggering interpretative short circuits that force him to build new codes of reading reality. This process often implies an ironic attitude that inevitably leads to open denunciation ( Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová ), or provocative anonymity ( Kimsooja ).