Bari group show explores desert as metaphor for inner journey

The collective exhibition 'Deserti' at Galleria Murat Centoventidue in Bari features six female artists from Italy and abroad, using video art and video-performance to examine the desert as a non-place of solitude and self-discovery. Curated by Cecilia Pavone, the show references Jean Baudrillard's 1986 book 'America', which calls the desert 'the negative of the earth's surface and our civilized humors'. Raeda Saadeh's two-channel video performance 'Vacuum' (2007) shows the Palestinian artist vacuuming sand dunes in Palestine, a paradoxical act critiquing patriarchal subordination and symbolizing Palestinian Sisyphean resistance. Eleonora Roaro's 'Vanishing Point' (2019), inspired by Baudrillard and filmed at Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, explores disappearance. Elisabetta Di Sopra's 'Senza tracce' (2023) erases her footprints in Jordan's Wadi Rum desert, yearning for silence and invisibility against hyperreality. Julia Charlotte Richter's 'Point Blank' (2019), referencing the 1961 film 'The Misfits' with Marilyn Monroe, shows the German artist screaming her rage into the desert void. Shirin Abedinirad's 'Gliss' (2013) documents a circular mirror reflecting the sky in the Iranian desert. Sira-Zoé Schmid's 'Desert Flower' performance recalls Monet's woman with a parasol, walking with a blue umbrella until she dissolves into the horizon.