Mónica Bonvicini

Italian artist Monica Bonvicini (1965 Venice, Italy) focuses on the construction, the urban, and the architecture that articulates the social spaces where power is exercised. From architectural installations, performances, videos, sculpture, painting, and drawing, almost always using industrial materials or those coming from the construction industry combined with fabrics, leather, and paint, she manages to produce work that invites us to reflect.

Bonvicini presents us with spaces that question power manifestations, spaces that seek to collide with commonplaces that articulate social and gender inequality, that is why she unites concepts of psychoanalysis with gender stereotypes and objects that allude to fetishism to expose how institutional or private spaces determine the behavior social groups are supposed to have. For this reason, her work also discusses the origin of sexual behavior and the construction of sexual identity through architecture, which we can see in pieces such as Never Again (2005), an installation presented at the Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark.

Her work is a continuous dialogue with the viewer, as it seeks to provoke disruptive, irreverent, protesting, and even funny emotions. The artwork seems to play with the environment and more importantly makes the viewer question the power structures surrounding them Bonvicini challenges the museum world, as most of her pieces are not made to be housed in consecrated, silent spaces or where there is no space for interaction.

This month, the artwork Love is blind features on the cover of the magazine, which, with three simple objects, handcuffs, chains, and a mirror, manages in a very elegant way to challenge and expose the desires of its viewers.

“Art is the fetish per excellence. What I do and what all artists do is produce objects of desire that almost nobody can own and even if you do, you do not own the mind of the artist. So, in that sense you could even think of museums as large clubs or sex houses, places of orgies, annoyances, and pleasure.”

Monica Bonvicini in an interview for Nasty Magazine AGC