Chiara Fumai. Medium, Media, Medium.

Chiara Fumai was one of the most relevant Italian artists of her generation, her work having been shown at both the Venice Biennale’s Italian Pavilion and Documenta. In her practice, the performer often quoted feminist texts while playing the role of a woman possessed. I give an account of Fumai’s use of video, comparing it to Rosalind Krauss’s essay Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism. I explain the artist’s work as a dialectic overcoming of the analogy the critic institutes between the notion of art medium and the figure of the Medium. Highlighting that both Fumai and Krauss see Acconci’s early works as a benchmark, I illustrate how the two built an archeology of contemporary mediality.