Duolun Museum presents the latest exhibition of Swiss-Italian artist Beatriz Millar (1967, Switzerland), featuring a new body of works marking the continuous research of this eclectic artist on the subject of femininity, a topic already explored by Millar in the past that reaches in this project an intimate and almost archaic depth. It is also Millar’s first exhibition in China, an exciting opportunity to meet and confront the Chinese audience within the stunning architecture of Duolun Museum and Shanghai’s vibrant cultural life.

The exhibition focuses on the archetypal ideas lying beneath cultural definitions of woman. In a textual and visual research, the artist travelled back in time following the origins of the Western conception of womanhood passing through her own historical background, literature and pop culture. Born in a family of bread-makers, Beatriz Millar finds in the action of making, offering and eating bread the essence of creation, the power – in her vision a feminine power –  of making something with her own hands, questioning therefore the division of intellectual and manual work, between art and crafts.

The series of photographs titled Dedication are the result of a perfomative action that took place in Beatriz Millar hometown in Italy during a time frame of over one year, during which the artist made a series of woman-shaped breads, photographed before and after being baked and offered as edible gifts to people involved in all the aspects of her everyday life. The photographs form a large scale installation similar to a photographic diary documenting bread sculptures no longer existing, yet they function as traces of a simple and intimate celebration of womanhood. Along with the photographic installation, tangible bread sculptures are exhibited resembling idols of ancient human populations, set in plexiglass cases that – contrasting with the simplicity of a material like bread – accentuate the sacral aura of these objects. Through a new video work, the artist also explores the imperceptible transformations of the elements forming the dough of the bread, its change of color and consistency, the inaudible sound of the elements being mixed together and the shift of state, chemical transformations around which revolve the idea of creation.

The opening night will start with a performance of the artist, who will bake and offer to the members of the audience small eatable women, continuing the ongoing process that generated the entire project. The first floor of Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, is going to be the place in which through the action of creating an ephemeral work of art, sharable and physically assimilable, a new chapter of the artist’s fictional diary will be written with the precious contribution of Shanghai’s viewers.

Curator：Matteo Pollini
Coordinator：Wang Dan