Anna Esposito's Feminist and Ecological Collages Reexamined at Athens Gallery

Anna Esposito's exhibition 'What I've done' at Gramma Epsilon in Athens runs through 1 October, presenting a selection from her 50-year career. The show includes works like 'Fan of gunshots' (1972/2022), a collage remade for this presentation that originally appeared at the 1978 Venice Biennale. That historic Biennale exhibition, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio and titled 'Materialisation of Language', featured over 80 women artists including Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Denes, Natalia Goncharova, and Ketty La Rocca. Esposito's practice, emerging from Italy's 1960s poesia visiva movement, employs collage and visual poetry to challenge hierarchies between high culture and mass media, the personal and political, and humans and nature. Works such as 'Fishermen's village' (2006) transform an aerial photograph with painted fish and ring-pulls to comment on living conditions. The 'Ecological view' series uses plastic litter and bags to visually merge pollution with natural landscapes. 'San Sebastian' (1992/2022) presents a dead tree with chainsaw blades, critiquing extractive capitalism. In 'Tearing up my self-portrait' (1987), a ripped photograph suggests the physical unraveling of representation. The exhibition argues that Esposito's work, connecting feminism, social injustice, and ecological destruction, has been unfairly overlooked.