What a time for such a statement: Making Love Revolutionary. London, as elsewhere\u200a\u2014\u200aacross the U.K. and the world at large\u200a\u2014\u200ahas had a rough year. Make that a rough few, no several years. The country is currently at an election fever pitch, with headline after dispiriting headline. It\u2019s hard not to note, to feel in your very bones, the terrible erosion of language, its shift to something co-opted, manipulated, and emptied of meaning, only to be filled with hatred and circular, self-defeating knowledge. By the time this review is published, we will know the outcome of all of this. But in the moment, there is hope, which always finds a way to endure. A pleasure, then, to be reminded\u200a\u2014\u200aoverwhelmed, even\u200a\u2014\u200aupon entering Anna Maria Maiolino\u2019s expansive exhibition, which spans six decades of the artist\u2019s wide-ranging, tactile, confronting, and political oeuvre.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cArt is the activist,\u201d Maiolino has said. \u201cArt is a political exercise. When the moment asks me to take a position, I use metaphors to speak.\u201d Maiolino has witnessed her share of moments in which to take a position, from the collective to the individual. Born in 1942, in a small town in the impov\u00aderished Southern Italian region of Calabria, Maiolino vividly recalls the hunger and poverty she experienced growing up in wartime and post-wartime scarcity, and later under the dictatorship in Brazil, where her family immigrated in 1954. Early woodcuts like Glu Glu Glu, and ANNA (both 1967), show stark faceless forms, bald and with gaping mouths that are starving or screaming, maybe both. Other early works, In-Out-Anthropophagy (1973), and What is Left Over (1974), use photography and film to summon hunger, and the anger and violence of the mouth\u200a\u2014\u200athe food it consumes, the language and meaning it produces (or lack thereof). The earlier work, a super 8 film, shows two mouths framed closely\u200a\u2014\u200amale and female\u200a\u2014\u200ataped shut, swallowing eggs, regurgitating multicoloured strings, grimacing, while the later is one of the artist\u2019s \u201cphoto-poem-action\u201d works\u200a\u2014\u200aa triptych of black-and-white photographs in which she holds a pair of open scissors to her nose and tongue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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