In Italy This September: 5 Exhibitions That Talk Feminism
By Marianna Reggiani
01.09.2025
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End of summer, time for recaps. September is a merciless reminder that procrastination must end now, lest we risk postponing everything until January. Procrastination discourages change, and if change is urgent, it becomes an unforgivable act.
We shouldn’t need to explain why change cannot be postponed in a country where only 10% to 15% of artists exhibited in museums are women, and where—from academies, auctions, galleries, public and private institutions, all the way up to the Venice Biennale—”the higher you go, the fewer there are women artists”*.
And while we still find headlines referring to a “women’s exhibition”—as if the default, the one needing no qualifier, is male—we’re reminded that the real problem lies in a perspective that remains deeply flawed. A proper perspective would put the artists’ names and surnames on the front page, focusing on their talents and careers rather than their personal experiences. A proper perspective would delve into the merits of their research, rather than remaining comfortably superficial.
Here are five exhibitions to visit in September to change your perspective and break out of the “women’s ghetto” that has always been too narrow.
Light and fight – Luce e lotta nelle opere di Zehra Doğan, Fondazione MACC in Calasetta, Sardinia (until September 30)
Fondazione MACC, Calasetta. Zehra Dogan. Light and fight, exhibition view, photography Margherita Villani, courtesy of the artist;
Everything is symbolic in the exhibition hosted by the MACC Foundation in Calasetta, in southern Sardinia, which mirrors the Mediterranean and greets Africa and Europe every morning.
The Kurdish artist, journalist, and activist, a dissident of the Erdogan regime, brings her voice, still mindful—as it will always remain—of her 2015 prison experience.
On display, the clandestine nature of her art is illustrated by works created in Prison No. 5 in Diyarbakir, eastern Turkey. Sheets, coffee, cigarette ash, menstrual blood, hair, feathers: her illegal art lives in the discarded materials recovered from the margins of a stubborn survival; a disobedient art that denounces the conditions of women in prisons and the censorship she endured.
Zehra Doğan’s cry engages with the Sardinian textile tradition—ancient, slow, meditative—through the use of carpets as narrative supports. Each carpet thus has a body, a voice, and a gaze to tell its own story.
Euforia. Tomaso Binga, Museo Madre, Naples (until September 15)
Carla Lonzi said, “feminism has been my party” (Shut Up, Or Rather, Speak. Diary of a Feminist, 1978, Rivolta Femminile), and Tomaso Binga repeats it, in her own way. In her most extensive museum retrospective yet, which retraces forty years of her practice through approximately 120 works, the artist, together with curator and director of the Madre Museum, Eva Fabbris, has chosen a title that is already a manifesto. The word “euphoria” contains all the vowels, “phonetically universal and extroverted,”** representative of the complexity and exuberance that the language possesses by its very nature. An exhibition that is a party and a celebration, therefore, between visual poems, installations, collages, archival documents, and performances; a polyphony that joyfully and wholeheartedly sings the vitality of language, which can liberate, critique, desecrate, construct, and redefine.
Rebecca Horn, Cutting Through the Past, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (until September 21)
The first retrospective dedicated to the artist in an Italian museum, the exhibition curated by Marcella Beccaria traces Horn’s career through thirty-five works, including installations, sculptures, videos, films, and drawings, from her debut in the 1960s to her most recent works.
A master of self-determination, Horn successfully navigated the great themes of modernity—the machine, the body, power—through unique, imposing, timeless creations imbued with an immortal aura. Releasing the female body from the burden of motherhood and sensuality, Horn transformed it into a noisy, threatening, and disquieting machine, free to express ugliness and disturbance: a process of re-signifying the female body, liberating it from immobility.
With a title that references the 1993 installation, part of the Castello’s permanent collection, Cutting Through the Past is the first major exhibition since the artist’s recent passing on September 6, 2024, after eighty years of mechanically walking this earth.
Tina Modotti. Donna, fotografa, militante. Una vita tra due mondi (Tina Modotti. Woman, Photographer, Activist. A Life Between Two Worlds), Museo di Roma in Trastevere (until September 21)
From San Francisco to Mexico, from her affair with Edward Weston to her friendship with Frida Kahlo, to her membership in the Mexican Communist Party and exile in Berlin: the exhibition recounts the life and political activism of the Italian-American artist who, rediscovered posthumously, is now considered a pioneer of social photography. Her shots speak to us about the Mexican reality, of the revolution, and of the political participation that inspired her artistic practice from the very beginning. Moving further and further away from a pictorial style, her works achieve a compositional rigor born of a steady gaze and a pure, respectful sensibility.
Sixty photographs, letters, texts, documents, and articles reveal the complexity of a woman who lived and recounted everything in the singular first person, never allowing herself to be defined. So much so that even her sudden and suspicious death, which occurred in 1942 in a taxi, reportedly from a heart attack, remains a mystery still to be solved.
Swiss Pavilion – Architecture Biennale, Giardini della Biennale, Venice (until November 23)
Lisbeth Sachs, Kunsthalle for the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA), Zurich 1958, courtesy La Biennale (left); Swiss Pavilion, Architecture Biennale 2025, Venice, courtesy La Biennale (right);
Four young female architects—Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, and Myriam Uzor—together with artist Axelle Stiefel, ask themselves what the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice would have looked like if, instead of Bruno Giacometti, it had been designed by Lisbeth Sachs, one of Switzerland’s foremost female architects. The exhibition is titled The Final Form Will be Determined by The Architect on The Construction Site, (Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt), quoting a note Sachs jotted down on the Kunsthalle’s design for the second Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA), held in Zurich in 1958. Promoted by thirty women’s organizations, SAFFA aimed to shed light on the precariousness of professional women in the postwar years. This project was revived this year in Venice, with an installation that, while engaging with the work of Bruno Giacometti, shines a spotlight on the historical void of female architects in the Giardini della Biennale, where no woman has ever designed a national pavilion.
*Francesca Guerisoli, Il Sole 24 Ore, November 2018 (link)
**Euforia. Tomaso Binga, Museo Madre, Napoli, press release;
Translated and edited in English by Dobrosława Nowak
