Born just three years apart on opposite sides of the globe, Liliana Maresca and Gundula Schulze Eldowy were both entered into worlds of political turmoil. Maresca (b. 1951, Avellaneda, Argentina), under the fascistic rule of General Juan Perón (followed by military dictatorship in 1976), and Eldowy (b. 1954, Erfurt, Germany), in GDR controlled East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. Heavily policed and creatively stifling, these environments nonetheless fuelled the photography of both women, whose trailblazing practices connected under the same roof at this year’s Artissima art fair in Turin.
A multidisciplinary artist who made sculpture, performance and installation as well as photography, Maresca was the figurehead of an underground collective of Buenos Aires artists that sprang to life following the end of military dictatorship in 1983. Like the rest of her eclectic practice, Maresca’s photography was an act of social and political rebellion, often using her own nude body in performative self-portraits that defied traditional feminine expectations and years of state censorship.
