Chiara Fumai (Rome 1978 - Bari 2017) is an
Italian artist known for her
performative and multi-media works featuring psychic abilities, anti-spectacle strategies and counterculture icons.
Always refusing to be victimized, minoritized or diminished as
female artist, Chiara Fumai adopted the vocabulary of threat, offence, revolt, violence, vandalism and boredom to produce uncomfortable situations, collages, environments and actions in open opposition to the dominant discourses of Western patriarchy. Playing an ironical game of true fiction which appropriates the techniques of remixing and channeling, Chiara Fumai's performative pieces evoke female figures who, with their courage and anger, marked human history just before being excluded: amongst them, bearded lady Annie Jones and Circassian beauty Zalumma Agra, German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof and illiterate medium Eusapia Palladino, philosopher Rosa Luxemburg and
feminist writer
Carla Lonzi. Her remarkable and peculiar gallery of portraits also included a few male presences like the illusionist Harry Houdini. Not to be forgotten is Nico Fumai, the first of her fictional personas and unique in having a biographical origin. With him, Chiara Fumai not only imagined a new profession for her father but also used her interest for Italo disco as a strategy to interpret a specific historical era as well as bringing together a number of different fields of research.
