Marilisa Cosello: Siren
The contemporary art project ‘Vetrina’ inaugurated its second cycle of presentations in February 2024. After exploring the broad theme of nature through the site-specific works of the first nine invited artists, the focus has now shifted to the theme of activism, exclusively involving women artists who are enterprising and provocative in different ways and who have always, in their works, provided space for a proactive reflection on the contemporary world. The 2026 exhibition programme inaugurated with “Intrico” by Daria Dmytrenko.
For Vetrina#17, Mara Sartore has invited artist Marilisa Cosello (b. 1978, Salerno). Working across performance, film, photography and installation, Cosello centres her practice on a systematic investigation of the body – disciplined, socially codified – as a site where power becomes legible. In her practice, the body functions as a measuring instrument applied to the structures that govern collective life: a device through which ambition, aesthetics, gender and institutional authority converge, revealing what they ordinarily conceal.
For this occasion, the artist will present “Siren”, a site-specific installation that takes labour as a political field to intercept the imaginary of the “Office Siren” – the contemporary reactivation of 1990s corporate aesthetics as an object of desire – and to interrogate the condition of the female body as an instrumental function within the productive machine. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s reflections on the capitalisation of corporate aesthetics and the “slow cancellation” of a collective imagination, “Siren” returns the female figure to the threshold at which body and apparatus coincide, and the aesthetics of labour reveals itself as the very form in which desire presents itself today. The work unfolds in two moments: the window installation in July and the performance in September.
“Vetrina” is a series of exhibitions curated by Mara Sartore for Vino Vero, in collaboration with Lightbox. After exploring the broad theme of nature through the site-specific works of the first nine invited artists, the focus has shifted towards creating a platform for women artists. This phase exclusively involves female artists, bold and provocative in different ways, who have always used their art to foster constructive reflections on the contemporary world. The challenge is to present works of art in a limited space and in direct contact with the public, where the Vetrina becomes an integral part of the artwork itself, rather than just a place for exhibiting goods.
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