Marinella Senatore at Michel Rein in Paris

Michel Rein is pleased to present Alliance des Corps, the inaugural solo exhibition of Marinella Senatore at the gallery (October 13th - December 21st, 2024). Throughout the gallery's spaces, the light works, collages, drawings, banners, and films express Marinella Senatore's creativity. Marinella Senatore has imposed a participatory art experimenting with the creative power of the collective.

Through The School of Narrative Dance, Marinella Senatore, opening a dialogue between history, culture, and social structures, has organized giant parades around the world (more than 7 million participants since 2012) mixing local communities, musicians, dancers, and activists. The banners hanging over visitors in the exhibition at the gallery come from these parades and recall the traditional processions of Southern Italy, where the artist is from, without their religious dimension.

Marinella Senatore's work is a call to «build community». Marinella Senatore invites us, through dance, to use our body, in its fragility and singularity, as a means of resistance. This common need to weave a new social bond through bodily expression appears in all of the artist's practices. The messages written on her installations and her luminous works are injunctions to come together, become one, celebrate life, beyond our differences. Creativity appears in all its forms in the collages on gold leaf. The collages take up all the iconographic elements that reflect the artist's desire for otherness.

Among these elements, music is a primary source of inspiration. A graduate of the Avellino Conservatory of Music (Italy), Marinella Senatore played as a violinist in an orchestra. Marinella Senatore's drawings, displayed on the first floor of the gallery, refer to major historical events where citizens came together to fight for their rights. These great moments of social cohesion, driven by a utopian desire to change the balance of power and allow access to active citizenship, are essential sources of inspiration for the parades that Marinella Senatore creates throughout the world.

This political vision is further affirmed in the film "Nui simu", 2010, presented at the 54th Venice Biennale. The project, born from a collaboration with retired miners from the Sicilian city of Enna and students from the University of Catania, took the form of a month-long open workshop during which the various protagonists shared their knowledge, hopes, and fears, setting up a utopian community where everyone emerged stronger.

Marinella Senatore's works will also be exhibited at the gallery's booth at Art Basel Paris from October 16 to 20.