To bring together, within a single exhibition constellation, the works of Salome Rigvava, Romina Bassu, Laura Sanders, Krizia Galfo, Evgeniya Dudnikova, Marion Bataillard, Opal Mae Ong, Marinella Senatore, Sarah Fripon, Kaito Itsuki, Alice Herbst, and Etsu Egami is to engage with a question that lies at the heart of contemporary artistic discourse: to what extent can the feminine still function as a critical category without reducing the plurality of experiences, geographies, and artistic languages to a singular definition of identity?

The exhibition takes shape precisely within this tension. What brings these artists into dialogue is neither adherence to a shared aesthetic nor the articulation of a common iconographic repertoire, but rather the possibility of observing how distinct contemporary artistic practices question the processes through which identity, experience, memory, and representation are constructed and transmitted.

In this sense, the feminine emerges not as a circumscribed theme, but as an open field of possibilities. It may manifest itself through the presence and representation of the body, but equally through the construction of space, the relationship with landscape and objects, the elaboration of memory, the affective dimension, language, imagination, or collective participation. In other words, the feminine does not necessarily coincide with what the work represents: it may reside in the perspective from which the work originates, in the artist’s position in relation to the visible, and in the processes through which experience is translated into image.

The diversity of artistic languages represented in the exhibition is therefore integral to the project. Figuration, photography, conceptual and interdisciplinary practices delineate a deliberately heterogeneous territory in which the recognisability of the real coexists with processes of alteration, fragmentation, and perceptual ambiguity. In certain works, everyday reality is observed with an almost analytical precision; in others, the image appears progressively to emancipate itself from its descriptive function, becoming a mental space, a repository of memory, a projection, or an apparition.

Of particular significance is the relationship between the individual dimension and the collective construction of identity. Intimacy, domesticity, interpersonal relationships, and private experience do not constitute territories separate from the public sphere, but rather sites in which social structures, cultural conventions, and systems of representation are continuously at work. Likewise, where artistic practice explicitly enters the participatory or political realm, the individual is not subsumed into the collective but remains its primary measure and point of articulation.

What emerges is thus an understanding of identity as a process rather than a given: something continuously produced at the intersection of personal experience and shared imaginaries, memory and the present, belonging and otherness. The presence of artists from different generations and geographical contexts further expands this perspective, divesting the very notion of femininity of any claim to universality. What is proposed here is not a paradigmatic female experience, but a plurality of positions from which reality may be observed, questioned, and reformulated.

Even where the body appears, it participates in this condition of instability. It does not necessarily constitute the conceptual centre of the work, but functions as one of the possible devices through which relations with the other, vulnerability, desire, self-perception, or the conventions of the gaze may be interrogated. Elsewhere, it is precisely the body’s absence that becomes significant: environments, traces, natural forms, objects, or the structures of the image itself preserve the presence of a subject that does not require representation in order to assert itself.

It is precisely this oscillation between presence and absence, visibility and withdrawal, the private dimension and the public sphere that resists any reading of the exhibition through a rigidly defined category of identity. The feminine appears here not as an essence to be represented, but as a critical position from which the very processes of representation may be interrogated.

The works assembled in this exhibition thus trace a cartography that is necessarily incomplete and discontinuous. Rather than attempting to define what it means to be a woman today, they reveal the increasing inadequacy of any totalising definition. It is in the irreducibility of these individual experiences that the project finds its coherence: not in the assertion of a common identity, but in the possibility of recognising difference itself as a form of relation.

Femininity thus becomes not a boundary within which these practices are to be contained, but a point of departure for a broader reflection on contemporary identity and on art’s capacity to render visible its multiple, contradictory, and continually shifting forms.