Marinella Senatore

Working across video, installation, performance, photography and drawing, Marinella Senatore’s practice is characterised by a vital engagement with public participation. Works often involve thousands of people, with participants cast as writers, directors and actors in productions that foreground the importance of storytelling. Senatore activates structures for others to occupy creatively, which have included operas, parades and a radio show. These open platforms are underscored by principles of emancipation, inclusion, and the desire to empower individuals. Harnessing forms of collaboration and social exchange the artist explores how collective memories can be produced through shared action.

With works drawn from four distinct projects, MOT International is delighted to be presenting Senatore’s first exhibition in London. Exhibiting both new and existing pieces developed over the past five years, the exhibition reviews Senatore’s generous and prolific output. The artist has an extraordinary ability to galvanise collective activity, bringing together heterogeneous and aggregating networks of individuals that often remain in place long after the completion of the work. Prioritising forms that reassess divisions of cultural labor, projects are directed and authored by those involved, with Senatore herself taking on the role of instigator. The artist’s personal negotiation of materials produced on-site is explicitly representational, resulting in documentary film and photography, or drawings and sculpture that reflect the inclusive language of her practice as a whole. Centrally, Senatore’s work is in nurturing meaningful exchanges with the communities she creates.

Having been awarded the 2014 Premio MAXXI Prize at the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Senatore’s many solo museum and institutional exhibitions include Public Secrets, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St Gallen; Marinella Senatore, Building Communities, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; Marinella Senatore, Costruire comunità/Building Communities, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and Roommates, Macro Museum, Rome. She was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations, at the 54th Venice Biennal. In 2014 she exhibited at Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Göteborg Biennial and the 12th Biennial of Cuenca, Ecuador.